Tagged: Christ
The Courage to Keep Going: The Journey of Faith
Sermon preached at Billtown Baptist Church, Sunday September 28, 2025.
Scripture Reading: Hebrews 11:1-40 (NRSV).
Faith is like a journey toward God’s destination, a journey we don’t see the end of, but we trust, knowing who God is, that God will bring us there.
Out of curiosity this week, I looked up the longest unbroken walk on record.
The longest unbroken walk on record was done between 1976 and 1983 by a man named George Meegan.
Meegan was born in England. He grew up in a disadvantaged home. His father left him after his mother died of cancer. He was raised by his uncle, and when he was old enough, he ran away to the Navy. He served in the British Merchant Navy until his early 20s and then retired from it with the idea that he would hike the furthest hike on foot anyone has ever done.
He started at the very bottom of South America, walked north, up along the mountain range that runs along the coast (up Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, into Colombia). He went up through Panama, Mexico, into the United States, turned East, and hiked up the Atlantic coast all the way to Canada. From there, he hiked across the Trans-Canada to the West Coast, then went north as far as he could go, ending his hike at the very top of Alaska.
In doing so, Meegan set the world record for longest unbroken walk, walking a total of 19,019 miles. That is roughly 41 million steps.
It took him six years and 12 and a half pairs of hiking shoes.
In crossing into Panama, he hiked through one of the most dangerous areas in the world at the time, the gap between Panama and Colombia, an area controlled by gangs, where he was shot at and someone tried to kill him with a knife. Yet he kept going.
Why did he do what he did? What inspires—or possesses, it depends on who you look at it—what drives a person to spend 6 years of their lives hiking non-stop?
Meegan gave a simple answer: He believed, as a person growing up disadvantaged, he needed to tell the world that “No journey is impossible, especially not if you have the courage to take the first step.”
Meegan went on to be an award-winning educator, inspiring kids in poverty to rise above their circumstances.
Meegan wanted to live his life as if his life was a message to inspire other people: nothing is impossible. Have Courage. You can do it. Take the first step in your life’s journey.
Faith is like a Journey
Faith is kind of like a journey. It can feel impossible, but with God it is possible. Take courage. Keep walking.
One Baptist theologian from about a century ago named William Newton Clarke once put it this way: “Faith is the daring of the soul to go further than it can see.”
This chapter in Hebrews is really a climactic moment for the book of Hebrews. And for the writers of Hebrews, faith is about continuing on the journey with God.
The author of the book of Hebrews is trying to encourage Jewish Christians who are being ostracized for their faith in Christ to continue and not renounce Jesus and go back to Judaism, even if that lands them in prison.
And so, if you read through the book of Hebrews, a book that some Christian scholars have called one of the most sophisticated books of the New Testament it is rich reading of the Old Testament and its careful presentation of faith in Christ—the book of Hebrews is building this case over 13 chapters that Jesus is worth preserving on with in the journey of faith.
Jesus is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word, says Chapter 1.
Jesus is superior to any angel and the law.
Jesus is superior to Moses and the promised land.
Jesus is superior to priests or even the mysterious figure Melchizedek.
Jesus is superior to any sacrifice or covenant in the Old Testament.
Jesus is worth staying on the journey of faith for. And the writer just keeps driving home this message: don’t fall away, keep going, Jesus is greater. The journey of faith in Jesus is worth it.
That brings us to chapter 11, where the writer gives the climax of their argument. Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval.
By faith, we know the world was made.
By faith, Abel offered an acceptable sacrifice over his brother Cain.
By faith Enoch was carried up to heaven.
By faith, Noah built the ark.
By faith, Abraham journeyed for God and became the father of a great nation.
By faith, Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt and to the promised land.
Example after example. By faith, great people of the Bible went on the journey with God; they endured difficult things, they did great things for God, and they persevered on the journey. You can do.
God can do amazing things in your life and through your life. Have faith.
Faith as Seeing
Now, I need to say this: Faith involves trust, but that does not mean it is utterly blind faith, nor is it irrational, nor is it foolish, properly understood.
You can only imagine that someone like George Meegan did a lot of planning. He didn’t just crack his knuckles and decide he was going to walk 19,000 miles on sheer willpower.
He had support. He had friends. He had encouragement.
He apparently had good shoes. The record is keen to tell us that they were Italian hiking shoes—fancy—so not just some pair you bought at Walmart for a few bucks in September for a new school year for your kids, since your kids’ feet grow like crazy, then they, in turn, wear out those by November, not like those shoes, thank-you very much. They were good shoes. Just saying.
He had help, but that did not make the task any less daunting.
He still had to start somewhere, and it began with him saying to himself: I want to do this. I believe I can do this. I believe in doing this in order to make myself a better person, to make the world a better place. This, I believe, is something worth doing.
In order to press on in the journey of faith, you need to believe certain things and keep reaffirming that belief. The writer of Hebrews suggests something similar:
And without faith it is impossible to please God, for whoever would approach God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.
This seems like one of those “Duh” moments. If you want to go on a journey with God, you need to believe in God. Thanks, Captain Obvious.
It seems simple, but it is true.
If you want to go on a journey with God, you need to trust that God is there. God is always there, but if you don’t trust that, you don’t know it, and you won’t see it.
One scripture says, “We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7).
Faith is like a form of seeing. It is how we walk. It’s how we know where we are going. It’s how we know who we are walking with.
What We Believe in Changes How We Walk
Sometimes it is important to state the simple things because we forget the simple things: What we believe about God matters.
If we want to have a sense that we know where we are going and how to get there, we need to grow in our understanding of faith. We need to think about our convictions and work them out in reading our Bibles, studying the advice of saints who have walked before us, praying, and serving. That doesn’t mean we all have to be academics and go on and do courses at ADC (although you can, and that is my shameless plug to convince you to come and study with us there), but we all need to attend to what our convictions are. Why do I believe in Jesus? What does Jesus mean for my life? Why is Jesus’ way the best way?
Hebrews puts a fine point on it as the writer is encouraging Jewish Christians not to go back to Judaism. Why not? Don’t Jews and Christians believe a lot of the same things? In many ways, yes. We share three-quarters of the same Bible.
You can say the same thing about other religions like Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. I am not of the view that we should be putting other religions down. There is much wisdom in these religious traditions, not that all religions are the same. I have read reflections by Islamic theologians that, in many ways, are far more kind and gracious than what some Christians believe.
But I don’t have a problem with this because I don’t believe Christianity teaches that we Christians are superior to others or that we always get things right, far from it. That’s essential advice for the journey.
However, with the author of Hebrews, I can’t get around the fact that Jesus is greater. Jesus is God revealed. Jesus is the perfect embodiment of the law—the perfect way to follow God, the perfect sacrifice—the perfect display of God’s forgiveness and mercy. There is no one else like him.
Jesus, his incarnation, cross, and resurrection show God drawing near to us, dying for us, and giving us hope in a way I just don’t see anywhere else.
Jesus shows us what God is truly like, and that changes things.
And this gives me a different way of seeing myself, others, and our world on this journey.
If I believe that God is revealed in Jesus, in his incarnation, I believe that God is on the side of every person. That changes how we walk the journey.
If I believe that God is revealed in Jesus, who died at the cross, I believe that God is on the side of every person, no matter what they have done, myself included, my worst enemy included. I believe that renouncing the quest for status and power and taking up a way of self-giving love for others reflects the very heart of God. That changes how we walk the journey.
If I believe that God is revealed in Jesus, who rose from the grave, I believe that death does not have the final say, there is no evil in this world that ultimately has victory, there is no sin that cannot be forgiven, no tragedy that cannot be righted, no pain that cannot be mended into joy. That changes how we walk the journey.
You can say it another way, by trusting Jesus, I know God is with us on this journey.
I know his cross is the best and only way to walk this journey—loving others, sacrificing for God’s kingdom, his justice and truth.
I know because of Jesus’ resurrection that nothing is going to stop us on this journey to God: not sin, not death, not anything.
“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Knowing those kinds of things, trusting those kinds of things, sustains us for the journey.
Faith Means Taking the Next Step
But here is the thing: You can have all the right food for the hike. You can have the right shoes, walking stick, everything packed. But it still comes down to whether you are going to choose to take those first steps.
It still comes down to wherever you are, you’ve got to keep on walking: One foot in front of the other.
Some of us are taking our first steps. Some of us are down the road a bit. Some of us —how shall I put this?—may be on their 12th pair of Italian hiking shoes.
God is with us on this journey, but as the author knows, the journey is still tough. It will have rough spots. There will be wandering. You will feel lost at times. You might fall down, trip, and feel like quitting. Or you will have moments where you are walking, but the joy is gone, and you are just dragging your heels.
I can only imagine that after being shot at in Panama, Meegan was probably thinking, “What did I get myself into. I hiked across one continent. Maybe this is far enough.” He probably had a moment where he had to muster up the motivation and conviction to keep going, knowing it would be worth it.
Faith is a journey. There will be obstacles. Keep going.
“Faith is the daring of the soul to go further than it can see.”
In recounting all the stories of people’s faith, the writer of Hebrews says knowing his audience is facing their obstacle of persecution: Some “were tortured, refusing to accept release, in order to obtain a better resurrection. Others suffered mocking, flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned to death; they were sawn in two; they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented— of whom the world was not worthy.”
We are not facing the same obstacles that the Jewish Christians of this time were facing. Ours is different. Ours are not the same, but we will have obstacles. If we somehow think that the walk of faith shouldn’t have obstacles in it, we are doing it wrong.
In our day, we could have our own list of modern-day saints, faith-trailblazers.
By faith, Billy Graham presented the Gospel to millions,
By faith, Mother Theresa served the destitute.
By faith, Dietrich Bonhoeffer opposed tyranny.
By faith, Martin Luther King fought racism.
By faith, Jimmy Carter worked for peace.
By faith, believers today give witness to Jesus’ coming kingdom in big ways and small.
By faith, God is still working. God is still walking with us. Keep going.
By faith, daily sins are forgiven,
By faith, despair is overcome with hope,
By faith, hate is healed with love,
By faith, injustice is confronted with truth
By faith, lives are transformed by God’s grace.
By faith, God is still working in people’s lives. God is still walking with us. Do you see it? Can you trust this?
By faith, what do you trust God can do with your life?
No matter where you are in your journey, can you, by faith, trust God enough to take the next step?
Whether that is a step into baptism, a step into deeper discipleship and learning, a step into a new way of serving, a step into a new way of giving, a step into a new path for your life or career: big or small.
Can you trust that God is leading us into better things on this journey?
There is an old poem called Footprints about a person walking with God along the beach in life, and the person turns back and notices that during the toughest times of life, there was only one set of footprints. Angry, they turned to God and said, “Where were you in those difficult times?” And God replies, “That is when I carried you.”
My friend has an addendum to this poem: He looked back at some of the best times of life, and instead of footprints, he sees thrashing, claw marks. What happened there, God? God replies: My son, that was when I had to drag you!
Some of us know both of those moments in our journey with God. Hopefully that helps us to be a bit more aware that God is there in the dark times and a bit more ready to step forward in faith into better times God has prepared for us.
May you trust this so that you can take your next step.
And may you trust that wherever we go, God goes with us, leading us deeper into a relationship with him.
Let’s pray,
Faithful and loving God,
God, who is with us in the journey of life.
God, you have never left us or forsaken us.
God help us remember all the moments of our lives, good and bad, and see you there, with us, working goodness, leading us into better.
God, give us your grace so that we can keep walking forward.
God help us to know by trusting you, you are leading us ever deeper into eternal life.
God forgive us for how we stumble. Some of us may be feeling very lost on this journey. Remind us that your grace has no limits. Remind us that you are always with us.
God help us to take that next step.
God, we long to step out courageously as a church, to reach our community, to be witnesses of our kingdom. God give us the eyes of faith to see the opportunities around us.
God, for where you have been with us and where you are leading us, we are thankful.
Amen.
The Humility of God: Palm Sunday and How the “Weakness of God” Saves Us
Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion!
Shout, Daughter Jerusalem!
See, your king comes to you,
righteous and victorious,
lowly and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
I will take away the chariots from Ephraim
and the warhorses from Jerusalem,
and the battle bow will be broken.
He will proclaim peace to the nations.
His rule will extend from sea to sea
and from the River to the ends of the earth. (Zechariah 9:9-10, NRSV)Zachariah’s Vision of a Lowly King
If you were to skim through the Bible, you would not be hard-pressed to find some grand depictions of God.
Jacob in the Book of Genesis has a vision of God when he is asleep at Bethel. God is at the top of a heavenly stairway, where angels are descending and ascending. It’s spectacular.
In the Book of Second Chronicles, the prophet Micaiah has a vision of God seated on his throne, and again, angels attend to him in a magnificent court.
Or, think of the vision of Isaiah where he sees God the king in the temple, and the train of his robe fills the temple, smoke and thunder bellow, and six-winged angelic seraphim continually praised God, saying, “Holy, Holy, Holy.” It’s amazing.
Or, you could go to prophet Ezekiel, who has a vision of God on a flying throne of sorts. This vision has this throne laden with gemstones, carried by four surreal angelic creatures, each with four heads glowing and spinning. It’s remarkable.
Or you could go to the prophet Daniel, who has a vision where God stands on the clouds above all the powers of the earth in judgment, and he is called the ancient of days.
God in these visions is majestic, all-mighty, holy, transcendent, and awesome.
These visions were given to these prophets in times of turmoil to remind the people that God is beyond their circumstances. God is of a magnitude that makes all our problems look small.
All of these depictions are true and good and comforting, but that is not what Zechariah does. The passage I just read is a prophecy from Zechariah, spoken to the people during a time of great chaos as well, but the vision takes a very different path to comfort the people than these other ones. Zechariah, in other passages, has similar descriptions of God to the ones we just listed, but here it is different. This one doesn’t give us the lofty vision.
And this morning, I want to reflect on a quality of God that we probably don’t think as much about: the humility of God, the lowliness of God. When was the last time you thought of God as humble or lowly? It doesn’t seem like something God should be.
Zachariah lived more than 500 years before Jesus, and he gives visions in his book that are meant to warn the people of their complacency but also comfort them with hope. Like most prophetic books he begins very heavy on the words of warning but moves into the final chapters with words of comfort, which is where this one happens.
So, what do these visions pertain to? The people have returned from being exiled, and their land has been decimated. Life is hard and uncertain. Enemies prowl the countryside to raid innocent people. There is lawlessness in the land. The great empire of Babylon has fallen, but the Persian empire now reigns. Persia is more tolerant of the Jews, but this is still a far way off from the visions of restoration the earlier prophets spoke about. And so, the people are wondering where is God’s kingdom? Why isn’t God showing up in power and glory, in fire and fury? When is God going to restore King David’s rule? Why isn’t God appearing like he promised to crush our enemies, make them pay, and make things better? Isaiah promised a day of peace so extraordinary cosmic that one day the lion will lay down with the lamb. When is that coming?
Zechariah’s answer to all of this is somewhat strange. God is coming; he is sending his king, his messiah representative, who will bear this redeeming presence perfectly. What does he look like?
See your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, but lowly—humble—and riding on a donkey.
Oh, okay? And this is the image Jesus uses when he rides into Jerusalem, praised as a prophet and messianic hopeful by the people. The people expect a mighty king, riding in on a stallion in armor and gleaming sword. The people cut palm branches, which were the symbol of the house of the Maccabees, legendary warriors and freedom fighters from Israel’s history. The people are thinking, finally now that day has come.
Yet, Jesus invokes this passage from Zechariah by choosing to ride in on a donkey: Humble, lowly. You can only imagine this might have been a bit confusing for some of the crowds: this guy?
I mean it is sort of like a world leader strolling into parliament driving a rusty, old delivery van. Somewhat underwhelming, you might think. And let’s be real: that is not what we want our leaders to do. We want the motorcade of limos and police escorts driving in perfect synch with lights flashing and little flags on the aerials. We want the expensive suits. We want people behind them also in suits, wearing sunglasses and eye pieces, concealing body armor and pistols. We want the displays of power.
Because let’s face it, when the going gets tough when my place in the world feels threatened and I feel like I need protecting. I don’t want a pushover in my corner.
If things get tough, who do I want on my team? Do I want Clark Kent, the mild-mannered reporter who bumbles about, or do I want indestructible Superman flying in in his red cape and laser vision?
Do I want the wussy Prince Adam, or do I want He-Man?
Do I want Popeye before he eats his spinach or after?
The choice is kind of obvious. Or at least it certainly seems so.
But a scan through world history might give us some caution. Just how often are the mighty on the side of the needy? Just how often are the rich on the side of the poor? Just how often are those of status on the side of those who are marginalized?
How often are the powerful good? Not very often.
Zechariah’s description almost sounds contradictory: Righteous, victorious, lowly. It feels like history usually only grants one of those at a single time.
You get one or the other. After all, “nice guys finish last” we say.
History shows that when we feel vulnerable, we don’t want the nice guys. We will choose the Alexander the Great’s, the Julius Caesar’s, the Constantine’s, not the Gandis, not the Mother Teresa’s, not the Desmond Tutu’s. And where does that get us?
How often are the powerful good?
Bonhoeffer and the “Weakness of God”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds us of this. Bonhoeffer was a pastor who lived during Nazi Germany. He founded a school that educated pastors against what the Nazis were trying to indoctrinate people with. The Nazis, as I am sure you all know, taught that Germany was God’s nation, the church, and the state were very much not separate, and so its leader must be God’s chosen, and Germany wanted to be strong and indeed was willing to be cruel to reclaim the prosperity it thought it deserved. Bonhoeffer saw this for what it was and denounced it as idolatry, even when most Christians in Germany didn’t listen. (Feel free to draw your own parallels to today’s political situation).
Bonhoeffer was censored by the police, and so, at one point he fled Germany for the US, only to reconsider and return. He believed that he could not rightfully lead the German people after the war if he ran from the problems they were facing.
So he returned, and in an effort to undermine the Nazis, he started using his contacts for the resistance. He began passing information around, some of which pertained to a possible assassination attempt on Hitler, which he was caught with and imprisoned and awaited execution. This part of his story is kind of complicated and debated as Bonhoeffer was, by conviction, a pacifist, but it seems that he was willing to help the resistance, and what that meant for his convictions is not clear.
Whatever the case, as Bonhoeffer awaited execution in prison, he kept a journal and wrote profound papers reflecting on the meaning of Christ in this messy, modern world he saw, this “world come of age” he called it.
Bonhoeffer realized how the power of God came to be used to justify the power of the state, the power of dictators, the privilege of the people against other people, and how the church can get corrupted by all this all too easily. If God is primarily about power—if that is the primary way we think about deity—then there is a dangerous possibility that you can easily slide from worshiping the God who is powerful to simply worshiping power itself. When you do that, you will be more than willing to oppress or even kill anyone who threatens your power.
How often are the powerful good? Not very often.
And so, in his Letters and Papers from Prison, Bonhoeffer wrote these famous words:
“[God] is weak and powerless in the world, and that is the way, the only way, in which he can be with us and help us… Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world… The Bible, however, directs him to the powerlessness and suffering of God; only a suffering God can help.”
The God who can save humanity must be a weak and suffering God, a God humble and lowly.
Why? It is only this that breaks our fatal addiction to power and privilege, our proclivity to solve our problems with violence and greed.
After all, if God is only a God of power like Zeus or Odin or Baal, who will one day obliterate all his enemies, why shouldn’t we do the same?
If God is the lofty God that does not tolerate any grievances against him, why shouldn’t we do the same?
If God is just a dictator in the sky, even if he is the most powerful one, this will never stop us from worshiping earthly dictators and secretly dreaming of how it would be nice to have that kind of power ourselves.
We can never see God’s kingdom by stockpiling power; we will never see the kingdom by eliminating our enemies. It doesn’t work like that. It never has.
This is a part of the lesson Jesus is trying to show us when he rides into Jerusalem on that first Palm Sunday. See your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, but lowly—humble—and riding on a donkey.
Jesus, the King who Refuses Status
Jesus, throughout the Gospels avoids and rejects the marks of status and position. It is not the way. Even though he, of all people, deserves it. He is a descendant of David, after all. He is someone claiming the status of messiah, the rightful king of Israel. He is the one shown by the Spirit to be the bearer of God’s kingdom, God’s presence. The dove descended on him in baptism, claiming, “This is my beloved Son.” He is favored by God.
What does Jesus do with this status? When you look at the Gospels, you see Jesus very intentionally refusing to take up his status or seek recognition. He does things that almost bewilder us like when he heals a person, he just tells them to show themselves to a priest and go on their way as if he does not want any money or fame from it all.
Or when Peter confesses that Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus tells him not to tell anyone. That’s a head scratcher: Hold on, there is a new king in town, and you don’t want us to spread the word? It’s like he is a completely different kind of king.
Jesus could have marched himself into a palace and said, “This is mine now.” He could have demanded servants bring him the finest clothes, the best foods, the purest wine, the latest version of the Iphone. He could have raised an army and punished anyone who questioned him. He could have made the masses bow down to him and grovel.
But if he did, would he be offering us anything different from what we see in the world today?
Jesus: born to a poor peasant girl, suspiciously out of wedlock.
Jesus: born in an alleyway stable, found lying in an animal’s feeding trough for a crib, wrapped in rags.
Jesus: the homeless rabbi, who has to live off of the donations of a few women.
Jesus: the miracle worker, who does not want any credit for what he does.
Jesus: who, after giving the most clear instructions on who he is at the Last Supper, took a towel and began to wash his disciples’ feet like a household servant.
Jesus: who when a band of thugs came to arrest him on false charges, refused the path of insurrection and violence and, in fact, even healed one of the men sent against him.
Jesus is showing us a different way.
Jesus: executed on a Roman cross—the most shameful way to die in that world—betrayed by his own disciples, denounced by his own religion’s authorities, abandoned by the people that just days earlier declaimed them his king, did not curse anyone but prayed, “Father forgive them. They know not what they do.”
Let’s just put it simply: If Jesus is the kind of person who cared about being treated with the importance he deserved and if Jesus cared at all to use his power to make sure the people who wronged him got what they deserved, our prospects for salvation would be zero. But that is not who Jesus is.
As Jesus said to his disciples, “The Son of man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45)
Or Paul says in his letter to the Philippians, chapter 2. Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very natureof a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
Not a “Clark Kent Christology”
Now, often when I have heard this, I know what I have thought, and I think a lot of Christians have a tendency to read this with what I like to call the “Clark Kent Christology.” Because, again, we want Superman. We want the power, not the humility. We prefer to believe that Jesus really is Superman incognito. He came for a short time disguised as Clark Kent. But you better watch out, because any moment he is going to go into a phone booth and come out in all his glory and start beating people up.
Yes, Jesus is coming in resurrected glory, but it would be a fatal error to see this as different from what he has been showing us his whole life till that point.
And if we make that mistake, we are back to where we started again: A God whose power works all too similar to the powers of this world.
But the Gospels are not trying to say this: Jesus did not become less God by becoming human or any less God by becoming a servant or any less God by dying on the cross for us. Quite the opposite.
The Apostles use all kinds of language to express this mysterious truth: The Gospel of John says Jesus is the logos of God, the word made flesh. Paul says in Colossians that Jesus is the visible image of the invisible God; Jesus, the one in whom the fullness of deity dwells bodily. The Letter to the Hebrews says that Jesus is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being.
These are all trying to get us to see that when we look at Jesus, the God who gives up the powers and privileges we think God rightfully has, we are actually looking at the very essence of God: a God who forgives the worst wrongs done to him, a God willing to suffer with us in our darkest moments, a God willing to be in those god-forsaken places like an execution cross.
This God does not put his status above others. This is a God of humility, and this is how we know God is with us.
The Gospel of John even goes so far as to call the cross of Jesus his “glorification” as King, as if to say, if you miss seeing God here in Jesus, on this cross, suffering and dying in this wretched place. If this is not the apex moment for how you think about God, you have missed the point, and you are very likely going to miss seeing God with you in your lowest point, too, sadly. The two are connected.
That is the point of Palm Sunday. The humility of God is the true power and glory of God. Neil Copeland writes about this in a poem:
Mary sang to the unborn Christ,“The Lord on high be praised,
Who has brought down the mighty from their thrones,
and the humble to honour raised!”
And if she had heard the laughter of God,
Still she would not have seen the joke,
When her son rode into Jerusalem,
Riding his borrowed moke,
As all through the shouting jostling crowd,
And over their cloaks he trod—
The highest of all on a poor man’s beast,
And a donkey the throne of God!
Copeland’s poem says there is almost an ironic humor to the whole thing—the “laughter of God,” “the joke”—God raises up the lowly by showing us the true power of humility.
It is the humility of God that is our hope. It is the weakness of God that saves us. It is a notion so counter-intuitive to what we want and know. It sounds almost blasphemous to think about the weakness of God, but that is the words the Apostle Paul himself used to get us to realize the truth we need to hear:
“Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength. Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness, and redemption.” (1 Cor. 1: 24-30)
The Humility of God is the Possibility of the Church
Did you hear the connection there? The humility of God, the weakness of God—this is also the possibility of the church, the possibility of real change, for this is the true wisdom and power of God.
How often do we forget this? In the 1990’s, the Baptist Pastor Jeffery Brown came to a small church in a dilapidated part of Boston. Violence in Boston at the time was careening out of control. Gunshots could be heard through the night most nights. Brown tells the story of how he prayed that God would do something, feeling powerless, like he was too insignificant to be able to do something about what plagued his community.
When a young man was killed on the doorstep of the church, Brown realized that God was calling him to do something. Sometimes, when you pray for change, God calls you to be that change. So, what did he do? He decided he would start a group of pastors, and they started staying out at night, coming up to gang members and befriending them, hoping to see if this would make some difference. People said that doing this was a waste, unbecoming of a pastor to do. In fact it was not safe.
Yet, in time, the gang members started trusting these guys and the pastors started asking these boys, “Do you really want to live like this? What can be done to actually help make sure you boys are safe so that you don’t need guns, drugs, and violence?” They listened, and they were able to engage community services.
Through Brown’s efforts, gang violence went down nearly 80%. The result, you can listen to Jeffery Brown’s amazing Ted Talk on this. It came to be called the “Boston Miracle.” They call it that because, sociologically, that level of violence reduction is impossible.
The change did not come by some slick politician making promises. It did not come with some grand show of force to clean up the streets, to arrest and jail all those criminals that society deemed irredeemable. It came by ordinary people, these pastors, getting over their feelings of security and status to go out and dwell with struggling kids on the street. That is all it takes for miracles to happen.
If God can use the cross to defeat sin and death in all its weaknesses, God can use you. God can use us. God can choose people who feel they have no business claiming to be holy and respectable, let alone powerful and important, to do the things we sometimes only believe are reserved for those who are worthy.
The kingdom of God does not come through billionaires or celebrities. It does not come to the extraordinary and special. It is not reserved only for some elite class of super-spiritual folk.
The kingdom of God is possible in you and through you, in us and through us: the body of Christ.
If you can imagine the strange sight of a group of pastors hanging out with drug dealers, playing basketball with gang members at 2:00 in the morning, you are not far off from the feeling it might have been to see Jesus that first Palm Sunday.
And what will we see if we dare to imagine Jesus’ way in our lives, in our communities today?
See your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, but lowly—humble—and riding on a donkey.
Amen.
A Difficult Joy
Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness,
you who seek the Lord.
Look to the rock from which you were hewn
and to the quarry from which you were dug.
Look to Abraham your father
and to Sarah, who bore you,
for he was but one when I called him,
but I blessed him and made him many.
For the Lord will comfort Zion;
he will comfort all her waste places
and will make her wilderness like Eden,
her desert like the garden of the Lord;
joy and gladness will be found in her,
thanksgiving and the voice of song. (Isa. 51:1-3 NRSV)
Hope to the Exiles
One of my favorite Christmas songs is O Come O Come Emmanuel. It is probably one of the oldest songs we sing in church, being written in 800 AD (1200 years ago). This old hymn was sung by monks as part of their Christmas vespers or prayers.
O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel;
That mourns in lonely exile here,
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
One thing I love about it is its slow and lamentful tone, as well as its proclamation of hope and joy.
This verse speaks to what this passage in Isaiah is really talking about: the difficult joy of God’s hope. The people are in exile and ruin. Their capital city, Jerusalem, Zion, with its temple, the centerpiece to how the people relate to God, how they know God is present to them, has been leveled to the ground and burned, reducing the countryside, as the prophet describes here, to a waste.
They have experienced the loss of their homes. Many of their family members were killed, and the people were divided. Poor peasants were left to the broken countryside of a now vassal state for an oppressive empire. If you were educated or useful in some way, you were taken captive in Babylon to serve the imperial house in some way. Many of these people were innocent people. These were not sinners being punished, but people who sought righteousness, the text says, yet endured the trauma of seeing Jerusalem fall and the hardship of exile. This is what Daniel and others faced, and they wondered where God was in all this. Why wasn’t God coming to their rescue? Why did it seem like they were getting punished with the rest of Israel that went the ways of idolatry and corruption? It did not make sense.
Captive Israel, that mourns in lowly exile here.
And while the people of God were able to come back to their homeland after the exile, they still faced the oppression of being ruled by tyrannical foreign powers till the time of Jesus. One empire after another oppressed God’s people in history: the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and, finally, at the time of Jesus, the Romans.
Year in and year out, the people had to live with a sense that things were not right; things are not as joyful as they were promised to be.
Difficult Christmas
I think many of us can feel the same way about Christmas approaching, that it is not as joyful as it should. I don’t know what it is about this year, but I feel like I have heard a lot more about people having a hard time finding joy at Christmas. I don’t know why.
I spoke to one lady. We talked about favorite Christmas traditions. I had just put up my tree with my kids, which I love doing because we have so many ornaments on our tree that represent different memories and milestones for our family (I also have a sweet set of Star Wars ornaments).
She turned to me to confess that she really could not get into the Christmas spirit because of how bad her relationship was with her father, who was particularly mean around the holidays.
Another told me that they don’t really do much for the holidays since they don’t have family in the area. They were probably just going to treat Christmas Day as a day off and watch TV; otherwise, remembering it was Christmas just made them feel really alone.
I spoke to another person who just said that the expectations of Christmas, whether the food or the gifts, or the winter heating bill, were always so expensive, and it was always hard to get into the Christmas spirit amidst all the worries about money. For some, the Christmas holidays are often just one day off, packed with more busyness than one is expected to do, all before having to go back to the grind of working a difficult, stressful job.
Another person voiced to me that this year, the state of the world has impacted them so severely: the wars that are happening, the political turmoil, and climate change. It makes any privilege we do have to feel bittersweet, even joyless. It is hard to celebrate and be merry when it feels like the rest of the world is burning.
This week, we light the Joy candle, but sometimes, we have to recognize how difficult joy can be in our world. It does not come easy. Have you felt that? Have you had a Christmas that just did not feel joyful? Perhaps you are having that season now?
The holiday season does something: it often amplifies whatever you are feeling. What do I mean by that? If you are having a pretty fortunate year, if you have lots of family and food around you, Christmas can just magnify those feelings of gratitude and fulfillment. However, if your year just isn’t going well, you are feeling down on your luck, feeling a bit alone, Christmas can intensify those feelings also, not to mention you can feel guilty for not feeling happier.
Can we be honest about those feelings? Because if I am honest, I sometimes feel those things too. I often feel them around this year, but especially this year.
Tuesday, Dec. 17th, will mark the 15th year since my mother died. That has been really weighing on me. Let me tell you the story. Forgive me for dumping my emotions on you this morning, but here it goes…
My mother died of breast cancer that went to her liver. Meagan and I had gotten married in May of that year. She looked well at our wedding like she had beaten the cancer. That is what we all thought. She had been battling it since I was in high school.
Then, the cancer returned according to a diagnosis in the early fall. It was everywhere. My mother was obsessed with new-age alternative medical treatments, thinking they would do something, but they didn’t work. I got a text from my brother, “Spencer, the doctors say she only has a few more months to live.” She was in denial at first, but we all knew it was true. She did not want to go to the hospital, so my sister, who lived at home, cared for her for the most part. Meagan and I came on the weekends. Her physical condition got worse and worse.
It finally came to the point where she had to go into hospice care. It was approaching Christmas time. There was no snow on the ground in Hamilton, but it was bitterly cold with strong winds off the lake. My brother, who lived down in the US, flew in to be at her bedside. We all took shifts, but we more or less all lived at the hospital for the next week. We survived on cafeteria food and coffee.
A lot of relatives and friends came by to visit my mother at this time.
Her state worsened over the next day or so. I just sat with her. She was awake less and less. In the moments then, I just kept telling her that I loved her and I would pray. Her breathing took on a rattle. Someone remarked that it sounded almost like coffee percolating—thanks to whoever said that—because for almost a year after, I could not be in the room while a loud coffee machine was brewing (and if you know me, you know that I love coffee, so that was awful).
The time had come, the nurse informed us. The family was all there by her bed. Someone invited me to pray. I prayed, thanking God for her and inviting her to go and be with Jesus. My mother took her last breath, and that was it.
We sat there for a few minutes in sober silence. The nurses came in and took her body away.
We slowly turned to practical matters like planning the funeral. We had the funeral the day before Christmas Eve. I don’t remember a lot of the service, but I do recall a friend of the family playing “In Christ Alone” for the service.
That Christmas, my family was all assembled at my mother’s home: my brother, sister, Meagan, and I.
On Christmas Day, we all sat together around the tree. There were no gifts because none of us really thought about buying anything in all the chaos.
I used to hear that some people did not like Christmas, and I thought those people must be some sort of mean, Grinch-like, Ebenezer Scrooge-like, Baw hum-bug grumps. Now I understood it. The next Christmas just was not all that enjoyable. Everything reminded me of my mom when I heard Christmas music, like my mom’s favorite Christmas song, Feliz Navidad. The lights, the food, the sounds, the ornaments—the expectation of being merry did the opposite.
Finding joy was difficult.
The Shepherds
It is in this context, this place, this space, this situation of joy being difficult, that we find the Christmas story. Or better stated, the Christmas story finds us. The reasons it was for them back then is different from us today, but we see a promise that applies to both.
There are many folks in the Christmas story that we could describe as in a place of difficulty.
I think of Mary, the poor young girl who agrees to bear Jesus. Joseph, who now had to navigate this strange new relationship and responsibility, how this will look with his family and his reputation in the community, how he had to flee political threats now from Herod.
But I am drawn to the shepherds in the Christmas story, in Luke chapter 2.
Shepherding was one of the poorest jobs one could have in that society (and not to mention dangerous, out in the wilderness with the elements, wild animals, and bandits). It was a job for outcasts. It is a job for people who were down on their luck.
Remember that King David was once a shepherd. He wasn’t one because the job was prestigious. He was the youngest of a large family, and so his father gave him the least desirable job in the household, tending flocks out in the wilderness. It was a job for the unwanted.
What would be the equivalent of their job today? Overnight Gas station attendant, perhaps. People who work at call centers are forced to do telemarketing because they need the money. People who have to drive taxis for a living. These are, according to reports, some of the least desirable jobs in our communities. Shepherds were marginalized folk, folk that did not have a lot to be joyful about in their lives.
Yet, this is who the Gospel is announced to. The angel announced, “Do not be afraid, for I bring you glad tidings of great joy for all people.”
Sometimes we can hear “good news for everyone,” but it can sound like “good news for people except me,” or “except for them.”
Isn’t it interesting that while the glad tidings are good news for all people, the angels did not appear to everyone? They appeared to the shepherds as if to say, if this is good news for you, for the least fortunate of society, then people can understand that this is good news for everyone.
The shepherds go and find Jesus, and the angels say that you will find your messiah wrapped in ragged cloth and lying in an animal feeding trough, a manger, and these things will be a sign to you of God’s good news for everyone. Most commentators of this passage say that this sign is just how to find the messiah, sort of like if you meet a person you have never seen, and they text you saying I’m the one wearing a red shirt.
However, I think it is more than that. These things are a sign to you. You will find the messiah born into poverty, lying in a dirty feeding trough, wrapped in rags, not expensive clothes, not in a golden crib. This messiah is a messiah for those in difficult circumstances. He is your king.
This is a sign that God understands us. God understands what we are going through. God is with us.
Since God is with these folks, we know God is with everyone.
If this event were to happen here, what would be the equivalent of the manager? We have such a whitewashed notion of the manger scene, so clean and regal. It is not a dirty alleyway stable; it is in so many nativity scenes.
It was this kind of space that Jesus was born in, wrapped in someone’s tattered second-hand coat. Who might come to see him? The poor, the drug addicts, the folks that work night shift struggling to get by realize if this baby is going to be our leader, things are going to get better, but he’s one of us.
Today in Kentville, you could imagine Jesus being born by the dumpers in a parking lot at Center Square.
A messiah born into poverty rather than power and privilege: This messiah is good news. He gets us. He is on our side because if God is on the side of the least of us, God is for everyone.
These are glad tidings of great joy that will be for all people.
You don’t have to love all the running around, all the expenses, or all the expectations of Christmas. You don’t have to love eggnog fruit cake or turkey (although I don’t know how anyone could not like those things). You don’t have to love movies with Macaulay Culkin or Chevy Chase in them (again, I don’t know how, but everyone is different). There is a lot about Christmas that can be exhausting and difficult, with or without carrying heavy emotional burdens. We can admit that.
However, we can still have joy, joy for the least of this world, joy for all.
How do we live joy?
How do we live joy when it does not come easy? It got easier over the years, and here are the things that worked for me. Let me give you a few things I learned over the years.
First is to rest in Jesus, rest in the joy of Christ: the truth that God understands us, God has drawn near to us; God is with us; God is for us.
Take time in all the business for prayer, reading scripture, sitting in silence, or perhaps just listening to the words of some Christmas carols and reflecting on their words. It might not be immediate as healing takes time, but doing these things keep our hearts prepared for better things. And better things will come.
The second is to cherish the simple good things that remind you of the good around us.
I remember when my mother died, and we all sat around the tree with no presents under us; I remember thinking that the gift we had that year was simply each other.
There is something about the pain we feel, when it reminds us about the fragile nature of life, it can also remind us of the preciousness of life.
Third, it will be different for everyone, but for me, have our kids made Christmas enjoyable again, whether it was watching Home Alone with them or decorating Christmas cookies. Seeing their joy at Christmas became a source of joy for me.
Perhaps that was one of the most significant ways I learned to have joy at Christmastime, when I realized bringing another joy deepened my own. Bringing joy to another helps us to have joy ourselves
Enjoying another’s joy. It reminds me that the year after my mother died, I worked as the coordinator of a soup kitchen in downtown Toronto. It was a rough job as I worked with homeless people, people facing really difficult circumstances. Many of the people I worked with had been abused by churches and pastors. They had been abandoned by Christians.
Yet, I remember doing our Christmas meal at the soup kitchen, and afterward, we sang Christmas carols. Suppose you can imagine a whole gym full of folks singing Joy to the World. I was struck by seeing people whose lives were so much more difficult than my own, people whose stories involved so much more hurt than my own, singing Christmas carols with joy. It changes your perspective. It permits you to have joy again.
Fourth, being in a space like that reminds you also that there is a responsibility to joy. As I sat with people who were homeless or in severe poverty, I often felt challenged. Many folks in poverty were not the lazy people who were draining my hard-earned tax money, a notion I was taught growing up. These were people often with mental health or physical disabilities, people who faced terrible abuse when they were young, or people who faced tragedy.
The terrible fact was that I could have just as easily been one of those people. We do not choose the family we are born into or the circumstances of privilege we are given. We don’t choose our brains or our bodies, nor do we choose what tragedies we will experience.
That means there is a sort of responsibility to joy. If we have been blessed, if we have been fortunate, Jesus’ way implores us to look for others to help, to bring joy to, to help those in need in our communities.
I feel like we have not been doing a good job here. So many of us have been so concerned with our financial hardships, we have forgotten others that are in more need than us.
Do you know a man was found frozen to death in one of those tents down by Miner’s Marsh? A 52-year-old man named Bobby Hiltz, a man that struggled his whole life with addiction and mental health. He was forced out of his home because his landlord spiked their rent. I wonder: What would have been a sign of glad tidings for Bobby Hiltz?
I believe our community has failed to address the poverty and care for the marginalized around us. We have failed to bring joy to those who need it.
We have glad tidings of great joy for all people. Will we live that this Christmas for everyone?
Will we be that sign?
The Christmas message is that God is bringing about God’s kingdom, where the first will be last, and the last will be raised up first. If you have experienced God raising you up, will you turn and do that for another?
Luke, two chapters later, says, it is the message of good news to the captive, recovery of sight to the blind, and letting the oppressed go free. I am reminded of the verse in Joy to the world that says
No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found,
Far as far as the curse is found.
Christmas is the sign that God keeps his promises. God’s blessings flow as far as the curse is found. God will undo and restore all that has ever gone wrong in this world, making it new.
As Isaiah says, he will comfort Zion and he will turn her wastelands into Eden again.
Are we preparing ourselves to let that reality into our lives this season?
Are we prepared to live that reality for others?
That is, as I have learned, a difficult but also beautiful joy.
Let’s pray.
God of all hope and comfort, God of all goodness and joy.
God who has come in our lord Jesus Christ, Immanuel, God with us.
God, we bring our struggles to you, our burdens, our worries, and maybe perhaps our frustrations and hurts.
God, remind us that you know us; you are closer to us than even we are to ourselves. You know what we have gone through, and you have seen our lives with perfect mercy and grace.
God, remind us of all the good things around us, the small graces we sometimes forget. God, give special gifts of your comfort and joy to those who especially need it this season.
God, also give us the eyes to see and ears to hear the needs for comfort and joy around us. Give us opportunities to be your hands and feet this Christmas.
God, our joy is your gift of hope, that you are a God of love and grace, that you have come to redeem us from our sins, to heal this broken world, to set right all that has gone wrong, to restore all things.
God, you give us so much. Give us the joy of thankful hearts in you in these coming days.
These things we pray in your name, amen.
Longing to be One (Or Alternatively Entitled: Why God is Not an Egg)
Preached at ADC Chapel, January 24, 2024 (some will recognize earlier versions of this sermon from earlier posts on this blog).
In the Gospel of John, John records Jesus on the night of his betrayal, instructing the disciples about many things. He tells them about things like his new command of love and about the coming of the comforter, and here he does something particularly remarkable. Jesus prays for the church.
20 “I ask not only on behalf of these but also on behalf of those who believe in me through their word, 21 that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, 23 I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. 24 Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. 25 “Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you, and these know that you have sent me. 26 I made your name known to them, and I will make it known so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them and I in them.” (John 17:20-26, NRSV)
Here, John uses this language that within God there are two identities (and a third he mentions a few chapters earlier): Father, Son, and the Comforter, Holy Spirit, and these three identities, these persons, these three somethings are one, a mystery the church has puzzled over ever since, speculating on the meaning of person, being, substance, relations, and a whole lot more terminology. Sadly, the Trinity is nothing but terminology for many.
Dorothy Sayers, a Christian novelist and a friend of C. S. Lewis, once joked that she felt like the doctrine of the Trinity was something theologians thought up one day to make life harder for the rest of us. Ya, caught me, Dorothy! While that was a joke, we have to admit that probably most of us at one point have sympathized with Sayer’s feelings on the matter, and for some, that may have been around week 12 of Christian Theology Part One last semester (I don’t know, just a guess). Rest assured; this is not a sermon about why you need to know the historical context of terms like homo-ousia or hypostases, as important as those are. For surely, the Trinity is more than concepts and vocabulary.
Too often, the Trinity is relegated to the equivalent of the appendix: an unnecessary fixture next to our large intestine that some will just eventually have removed. Or worse: Too often, the Trinity is the club to bludgeon the dissenter with rather than a bandage to nurse the sick soul. Most often, when the Trinity is mentioned in some churches, it is to point out just how wrong some people are and how right we are. (And if that is what we think doctrine is meant for, we have missed the point).
Or we try to over-explain. If you grew up in the church, you might have been subjected to quite possibly the most overused theological explanation of all time: “The Trinity is like an _____ (egg!). There is the shell, the yoke, and the white part. Or God is like water because it can be a solid, liquid, or gas.” There you go. Solved it. I don’t know about you, but I just don’t find the idea that God is like an egg all that comforting. And we wonder why Christian beliefs don’t connect with people.
I mean, at least we could have chosen a better food. The Trinity is like waffles: the waffle, the butter, and the syrup poured out like the Holy Spirit. Look, see, there are three, and they are delicious!
The Trinity is like bacon. I can’t think of three aspects of bacon, but if God is like bacon, I want it!
Well, analogies have limits, especially when it comes to mysteries. Dorothy Sayers followed up her joke about the Trinity with a really good piece of advice: if you want to understand the doctrine, you need to look at the drama. If you want to understand our Triune God, look at the story of Scripture. It is here that we encounter the character of God.
To confess Christ is to attest to how we have found ourselves in a story where the Creator of all that is reveals Godself in the history of a people, the Israelites, a people oppressed and enslaved under idolatrous tyranny. This God says God is One, the I am who I am, the living God and this God rescues the Israelites out of bondage to be a chosen people, a nation of priests, to reflect God’s character to the rest of the world, and this One God longs to be one with us.
If you want to know that doctrine, you need to know the drama. And so when we look at the narrative of the Bible, we see this One God revealing who God is in this pursuit of being at one with us in a way that mysteriously takes on—for lack of a better word—different dimensions to God’s self: the God who is beyond all things, infinite, transcendent, and almighty, is also the root of all existence, the breath of life, the presence of beauty, one in whom we live and move and have our being, the movements of love, known as Spirit.
As the narrative shows, these dimensions relate to one another. God sends his messiah, the king, but a king that is more than another human king; he is God’s only begotten Son, yet one with the Father. The Father sends the Son, Jesus Christ, the one who perfectly enfleshes the presence of the God Israel worshiped but also fulfills the longing for righteousness, this reconciling oneness with all things Israel was called to, and Jesus does so through sending the Spirit.
This is probably where it gets confusing for people (and we do not like confusing). What does it mean to be at one? Isn’t all this oneness talk just impractical abstract mystical stuff? Are we right to ask, as modern people, is all this really useful?
Or does it name something we long for? On December 31, 1989, Bono, the lead singer of the band U2, aired the band’s dirty laundry in a radio interview. The band was on tour with an album some regarded as evidence that the band was over the hill. The reality was the band was burning out. Bono had had his first child, and being away from his family was emotionally draining. Another member’s marriage was crumbling. The band was on the verge of breaking up. Meanwhile, members of the band were becoming interested in activism but struggling to make a difference. They were navigating how they could express their religious convictions in music while wrestling with the religious hypocrisy of much of Christianity. When the band got together to write music a few months later, the song “One” came out of a space of brutal honesty about where their lives were and what they longed for. Let me read you a few stanzas of it:
Is it getting better
Or do you feel the same?
Will it make it easier on you, now
You got someone to blame?
You say one love, one life
When it’s one need in the night
One love, we get to share it
Leaves you, baby, if you don’t care for it…
Have you come here for forgiveness?
Have you come to raise the dead?
Have you come here to play Jesus
To the lepers in your head?
Did I ask too much? More than a lot
You gave me nothing, now it’s all I got
We’re one, but we’re not the same
Well, we hurt each other, then we do it again
You say love is a temple, love a higher law
Love is a temple, love the higher law
You ask me to enter, but then you make me crawl
And I can’t be holding on to what you got
When all you got is hurt
One love, one blood
One life, you got to do what you should
One life with each other
Sisters, brothers
One life, but we’re not the same
We get to carry each other, carry each other
Some of you noticed the interconnected themes of love, marriage, justice, religion, responsibility, hurt, blame, differences, and division, all tied to that word Bono keeps singing over and over: “one,” oneness.
Some of you started singing that in your head. Others just sat there wondering why Spencer is quoting old people music. Some might be thinking, “Spencer, isn’t there any recent good music out there you could have quoted to connect with the younger generation?” And the answer is, “No, there isn’t.”
You can fight me on that later, but I hope you all noticed the theme: Oneness. U2, struggling with their marriages and what it means to be one life together, feels like that is one instance of a larger struggle all humanity participates in together. They use the notion in a very similar way to how Jesus uses it in John. In a similar way, my life is bound up with my spouse, how we are one flesh, how we are partners in life, and how we affect each other; God pushes us to see others that way.
“One life, but we’re not the same. We get to carry each other, carry each other.” It is a clue into the very heart and essence of God, just as much as it is an insight into the very essence and longing of our humanity. We are creatures that are connected to each other.
The past few years have continually illustrated the fact that we are connected. I have been thinking about the wildfires we had last year. It was being talked about on the news the other day.
Hundreds of homes were destroyed by a 25,000-hectare fire caused by such dryness that is unheard of for a province that literally has ocean on all sides of it. The weather is getting more and more severe because we are dealing with the effects of climate change that can turn a spark and a few embers into a wildfire the size of a city.
We are realizing that how we treat the environment affects one another. And at the end of the day, all it took was one person to burn some leaves in their backyard, and hundreds of families lost their homes.
We all longed for rain back in June, and then, you know what happened? We got rain, so much rain there was flooding all over the province. Then, a hurricane happened. Now, we are experiencing a strange winter, which is more severe than usual, while the rest of the continent is hit with Arctic winds. Our world is out of balance, and we are disconnected from it and each other.
It is things like a forest fire and flooding that remind us that a city of a million people like Halifax still needs to be a community, depending on one another, needing one another, affected by the choices of one another; that our providences and nation, just like individuals are not self-enclosed, independent, self-reliant units, able to carry one without help or helping others.
We are dependent on the earth and the seas, the fish and the animals, for the very processes of life that sustain us. We are dependent on each other. We are learning the hard way that we are all connected. Where one acts irresponsibly, all are affected, and also, where one suffers, all suffer.
We have been reminded again and again vividly over the last few years that we are all connected.
We are feeling how industrial practices on one side of the world affect farming on the other.
Health practices on one side of the world affect the health of communities on the other.
Wars on one side of the world affect life on the other.
We can’t get away from it. We are profoundly connected, but we continue to ignore this fact, retreating into our little empires of autonomy (some of us even use our Christian convictions to do so).
And yet, our lives are marred with reminders that we are living alienated from nature and each other. We are divided against the very things we need most. We are killing ourselves because we are constantly failing to see ourselves, our fate, and our identity as dependent on others.
We know we need to be one; we long to be at one with each other; we long for unity and harmony where we can all be ourselves, and others can be themselves in peace with the earth, and yet, we are not at one. We have given in to greed and selfishness or just slipped into an easy thoughtlessness, too concerned with the rat race of life.
We find ourselves reliving this story of humanity again and again, which comes to a particular intensity when people rejected Jesus’ invitation to step into the oneness of God. John says at the beginning of his Gospel: “The world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.” We know how this story goes.
Jesus died on the cross, executed by an instrument of imperial oppression orchestrated by the corrupt religious institution seeking to preserve its own power, but also betrayed by the ones Jesus was closest with, his own disciples his friends. The cross discloses the tragic depth of our tendencies to refuse to be at one with God and others, even when literally God is staring at us face to face.
But it is in these dark moments that God showed us who God is.
For Jesus to die one with sinners, yet one with the Father, reveals God’s loving solidarity with the human form—our plight, no matter how lost or sinful. God chooses to see God’s self in us and with us, never without us. God chooses to bind himself to our fate to say I am not letting you go.
John records Jesus putting it this way: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” And he counts the ones in front of him, the ones who he knew would betray him the worst—he counts them as his friends.
So often, we are tempted to lose heart, to recoil and collapse under the weight of our guilt and shame, when we think about the state of our world, our complicity in things like racism, war, climate change, consumerism, all the toxic squabbles we see on social media, or just our individual apathy to the needs of others we encounter on a daily basis— there is so much that might cause us to shrink back and say we don’t deserve a better world. We deserve what is coming to us.
To be a part of the people of God is to trust in Jesus Christ; it is to remember that in these moments of condemnation, we have been encountered by the presence of the Spirit, a love that invites us to see that we are loved with the same perfect love the Father has for his own only begotten Son. The same love that God has for God in the Trinity, God has for sinners, for you, and for me. God is not going to give up on us. Trust this. Trust this.
God is the God who, throughout history, stands with the undeserving, the least of us, the oppressed, the god-forsaken, the outcasts, the sinners—all humanity—announcing as Jesus did to the unfaithful disciples: “peace to you,” announcing God’s will for us is and has always been eternal life.
When we are suffering and scared, our cross becomes his cross.
When we are lost and hopeless, his resurrection becomes our resurrection.
This God who is God above has come and walked with us in Christ as God beside us and has redeemed us with the Spirit, leading us forward as God within us and through us, a love so undivided and unlimited, it is making all things one.
As John says, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness could not overcome it.”
And so, John challenges us to be at one with each other in a similar way to how the Father is at one with the Son: “May they be one as we are one.”
He prays for his disciples. He is praying for the church, which means he is praying for us today. In a world that is broken and divided, be at one with each other. Model the kind of empathy, acceptance, reconciliation, forgiveness, and encouragement that says, “I need you; I can’t be me without you; I cannot succeed unless you succeed; If you are hurting, I am hurting; We are one.”
“One life, but we’re not the same. We get to carry each other, carry each other.”
That is Jesus’ prayer. God knows I could use some prayer on this. I had my family call me from Ontario, wondering if I was safe through all the fires and floods. I tried to explain to them that not all people in Nova Scotia live in Halifax (a point that is routinely lost on them), but I also caught myself saying, “I am okay. This does not affect me.”
I caught myself doing something we all too easily do: since hardship or oppression does not touch my immediate experience, my job, and my family, I conclude I am not affected.
We can do that with so many things. Injustice does not affect me. Poverty does not affect me. Illness does not affect me. War does not affect me. That person’s financial troubles, that person’s health risk, that person’s views: not my problem. It’s theirs, not mine. And so, we choose to forsake the invitation into oneness of love again and again.
One reason the Trinity feels abstract is that we so often use it as just one more way to honor God with our lips (and perhaps our cognitive minds), but the reality is our hearts are far from God.
Two days ago, I was driving into work, and CBC radio mentioned police charged a guy with accidentally starting the fires, as I mentioned before. A 22-year-old decided to burn some dead leaves in his backyard. I remember uttering things to myself about what I hope that guy gets for being so stupid and thoughtless. But then the radio had an interview with a man who had lost his house, his farm, and even his cottage on the other side of the forest fire. The man was asked how he felt about the person charged, and all he could say was, “I can’t blame him. I’ve done a lot of thoughtless stuff over the years. Mine, thankfully, just didn’t have as severe of consequences as his. His mistake could have just as easily been mine.” I remember sitting in my car in the parking lot, just having a moment to take those words and that profound lesson in humility I just experienced. To the one who had caused all this destruction, this man who had every possession of his destroyed in those fires chose to see himself in the other. He chose empathy and mercy. He chose oneness.
Again, folks are so often tempted to see the Trinity as some abstract idea (and we theologians can admit some part in that), but the Trinity flows from our relationship with God and each other. It is an invitation into the movements of worship and prayer, service and sacrifice, solidarity and forgiveness that speaks to the essence of who God is and who we are and the only way we can move forward as people: We are connected; we belong to one another, and in God’s choice to be bound to us, to refuse to let us go, we are awakened to our responsibility to others—more than this: our privilege, our witness, “so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”
May we, daily in choices, grand or small, step into the oneness of God as a college, a community, a church, awaiting the day when God is all in all.
A Surprising Holiness
Preached at Valleygate Vineyard, Sunday, June 9, 2024.
Well, I am so glad to be with you again. It has been a busy week for me. It was my birthday on Friday. Last weekend, I flew out to Denver, and I presented a paper at a conference there (that is what we theology nerds do when we are not teaching classes, by the way, among other things). I presented at a society that is mostly a Catholic theology society, with a few of us who were Baptists. So, that means around this time last week, I was attending a Catholic mass that the organizers of the society put on, trying rather hopelessly to flip through the booklet of what prayers to recite and things like that. Now I am here, at a vineyard church. So, I feel like I have experienced the spectrum of worship styles in Christianity this week, from high church to charismatic.
The weekend was a good time connecting with colleagues and friends in Denver, but I must admit that I don’t like traveling. Specifically, I don’t like airports. This time, yet again, proved my point. The only time Meagan would be off and be able to come get me involved in a long layover in the middle of the night in Toronto for me. So, I tried to sit there in the concourse and rest. I ended up reading all the books I had purchased at the book vendors at the conference, which was not so bad, but when my flight finally arrived, I felt completely done and tired. Then, of course, they announce that there is something wrong with the airplane and we have to switch flights; the next available plane will be here in a few hours. After spending some 24 hours in transit, I was picked up by Meagan in Halifax, and I was a vegetable—a hungry, smelly, tired, incoherent vegetable.
On the plane, while I was wired awake from too much coffee, I thought about what I wanted to speak with you about, and one passage kept coming to me. It is one of my favorite passages in the Old Testament, and I have never had the chance to preach on just this text. So, I am excited to share it with you today. It comes from the Prophet Hosea.
Hosea is part of 12 books at the end of the Old Testament called the “Minor Prophets,” 12 short books, although calling them “minor” feels like that does not do them justice.
Hosea was a prophet who started his ministry of preaching around the mid-700s BC, so 700 years before Christ.
Hosea is also one of the most fascinating prophets because he had possibly the most bizarre calling. Hosea was called by God to marry a prostitute named Gomer, have children with her, and then when she left him to be with another man, God called Hosea to pursue her. God did this to use his life as an illustration for how God’s people had acted unfaithfully to him and that Hosea could now understand the hurt in God over Israel’s infidelity because he felt it with his wife. But also, despite all the unfaithfulness, God continued to pursue Israel out of God’s rich love, and so also, Hosea had to do this, learning and exemplifying what this striving kind of love is like.
Now, there is a whole sermon on just that right there—there are so many truths there that are as bewildering as they are beautiful—but what I really want to talk to you today about is in a passage 11 chapters into the book. You see in this travail of the people being unfaithful to God, and God warning that if the people go their own way, they will face the consequences, there is an astonishing passage. After the prophet blasts the people for their sins, God, quite surprisingly, tells Hosea to say this to the people:
When Israel was a child, I loved him,
and out of Egypt I called my son.
The more I called them,
the more they went from me;
they kept sacrificing to the Baals
and offering incense to idols.Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk;
I took them up in my arms,
but they did not know that I healed them.
I led them with cords of human kindness,
with bands of love.
I was to them like those
who lift infants to their cheeks.
I bent down to them and fed them.They shall return to the land of Egypt,
and Assyria shall be their king,
because they have refused to return to me.
The sword rages in their cities;
it consumes their oracle priests
and devours because of their schemes.
My people are bent on turning away from me.
To the Most High they call,
but he does not raise them up at all.How can I give you up, Ephraim?
How can I hand you over, O Israel?
How can I make you like Admah?
How can I treat you like Zeboiim?
My heart recoils within me;
my compassion grows warm and tender.
I will not execute my fierce anger;
I will not again destroy Ephraim,
for I am God and no mortal,
the Holy One in your midst,
and I will not come in wrath.Hosea 11:1-9, (NRSV)
I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.
What is Holiness?
What is holiness? Any bible scholar or even a Google search will give you the standard definition of holy, which comes from the Hebrew word, “kodesh,” which means to be “set apart.” When we look at some of the early foundational stories of the Bible where God is talked about as holy, we get a sense that the holiness of God is potentially quite frightening. God is so perfect and pure and transcendent that to come in contact with this is as beautiful as it is terrifying.
The Prophet Isaiah had a vision of God in his heavenly temple, where he saw the angelic Seraphim flying around chanting, “Holy, Holy, Holy!” and Isaiah describes this experience as ruining him. Seeing the holiness of God makes him feel unclean as all the goodness in him, the righteousness he thought he had compared to the people that he spends several chapters chastising, pales in comparison to the pure holiness of God. Isaiah exclaims, “Woe is me, for I am ruined.”
Even more severe, there are stories that speak about people coming into contact with something holy, whether it is the temple, touching the ark of the covenant, or stepping onto the foot of Mount Sinai; if they did this unprepared or even if they did this unintentionally, there are narratives that speak about how they risked death. The holiness of God is so pure it’s dangerous.
Growing up, I often felt like the holiness of God was portrayed as something like radioactive plutonium or something. Moses came down from the mountain, and he was always pulsating in all the children’s bibles. I admit, I may have had an overactive imagination.
Well, there is something certainly important about these stories. The holiness of an infinite God is an awesome thing. These stories help us see that God’s holiness has to be taken seriously. Things that are holy—the temple, the ark, the Sabbath—in the ancient mindset are the things that have been set apart, that possess the power and presence of purity and thus orient life properly, and so, must be respected. To violate these things is to invite defilement, disorder, and destruction.
In a way, the plutonium analogy is not too far off: plutonium can be used to produce awesome energy to power whole cities but is also not something you would want to fool around with. You have to handle it with care, knowing what it is capable of.
Well, all of this is true, but to just say that is to miss quite a lot. In fact, you have actually profoundly missed the point with its own dangerous consequences if holiness only means this.
What are those consequences?: A few years ago, I met for coffee with a person who faced addictions. I remember one particular morning we sat there for coffee and this person shared her story of going through some really dark times, some rock bottoms that I just cannot even fathom.
Out of my pastoral training, I felt obliged to ask her after she gave her story, “Where do you think God was in all of this?” I was hoping for some obvious Sunday School answer: “I know that Jesus was with me and that he loves me”—something like that.
My heart sank as she confessed that she did not know where God was in all this in her life. In fact, she insisted God could not have been with her. She had rebelled against God and was unfaithful. God is not with people like that. She had sinned again and again, and there is one thing she knew from growing up in church is that God cannot stand the presence of sin. God is holy.
God is holy, and that is why she was certain God could not have been with her, a sinner. Is that what that means? God can’t be with us because of who he is?
How many of us have heard messages like that?
You see if your notion of holiness is about being morally perfect and how God cannot stand the presence of anything that cannot measure up to this kind of moral perfection, you, like many Christians, probably have an idea of God in your head where God actually is not with sinners at all. God really just tolerates us.
Now, to say it like that, many of us would immediately know that to be untrue. However, as I had illustrated to me on that day, in the ups and downs of life, certain convictions we are taught growing up have a way of staying deep in us, lying dormant, festering, waiting to come out one day when life has you down: You mess up, people desert you, the ones you love hurt you, or you hurt them, you get caught in sin’s vortex of lies and bad choices and more lies—whatever those dark moments could be, and all of a sudden it occurs to you, that if God is holy, God probably wants nothing to do with a sinner like you.
Perhaps you were raised with a strong perfectionism like I was, where you may have been taught, “With enough faith, you should be able to stop sinning. If faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains, surely a little bit of faith is all you need to stop committing this sin or that sin.”
And so you say, “If God can do miracles, why can’t he take away this sin in my life?” And you are left wondering, “Maybe it is just because I don’t believe enough.”
Perhaps some of you have come to those dark moments—like I did one day, and you said to yourself, “If I am saved by faith, but I don’t have enough faith to stop sinning, maybe I don’t have enough faith to be saved at all. Maybe I’ve committed that unforgivable sin that one scripture talks about. Perhaps, somewhere down the line, I took God for granted one too many times, and I filled up my quota; and that was it; God cut me loose.” After all, as people are fond of saying, God is loving, but he is also holy.
The “but” there suggests love and holiness in most people’s heads is a zero-sum game, one limited by the other.
Many of us have heard messages like that, whether we were taught it growing up or it is just the voice of our inadequacies trying to get the better of us.
Holiness as Surprising Mercy
As I said, while God is perfect and pure and holy, yes, and God wants us to live in the right relationship with God and others, yes, if we leave it there, we shortchange the discussion because effectively this says that God loves us only when we perform best, when we get things right, and when we don’t mess up. And if not, God is done with us. Is that what holiness means?
The people of Hosea’s day were stuck in their sins. They had gone after idols and were unfaithful to God. They had forgotten all that God had done for them, and they had been doing this for hundreds of years.
And so, God sends the Prophet Hosea to warn them. If you keep worshiping idols, you’re going to keep getting hurt. If you keep making dirty political alliances, your luck will run out, and the empire of Assyria is going to come and conquer you. If you keep oppressing the poor, you are going to have more and more problems in your society. Wrongdoing has real consequences, and the Prophet keeps warning them: “Stop acting this way.”
Hosea condemns the people for their apathy and corruption, but then something unexpected happens. The people had not repented, and yet God out of the blue in Chapter 11, confesses God simply cannot bring himself to give up on the people. God looks at the people as God’s precious child and says:
How can I give you up? You are my child. I fed you. I taught you to walk. I led you as you took your first steps. Even though you rebelled against me and ran away, even though you hurt me, I simply can’t go through with punishing you. My heart recoils, and I feel my compassion growing warm and tender. I love you too much.
How can this be? Why is God doing this? God simply says: I am God and not like a mortal. I am the Holy One. I choose to be in your midst, not far away. And I have chosen not to come in wrath.
The logic of this passage goes in an unexpected direction from all the other passages before it on holiness. Indeed, God is holy—pure, unpolluted, and perfect—but there is something about God, the living God, where God is always surprising us.
When we are tempted to think our worth is found in our own moral performances…
When we are tempted to think God’s grace has limits…
When we are tempted to think that God simply is not there…
God says, I am holy; I am completely different from the god you have expected me to be.
I am holy, and therefore, I am uncontrollable and have unlimited compassion.
I am holy, and therefore, I will not use fierce anger.
I am holy; therefore, I will not punish.
My holiness is my limitless, unimaginable, incomparable love, love unlike anything else out there.
When you run from me, I still choose to be with you. That is who I am.
If you have a child who did something terrible, and yet you simply cannot bring yourself to punish them, you may have a sense of what the Prophet is trying to communicate.
In our very worst moments, God simply looks at us and seeks not the sinner, the screw-up—God does not see all the damage we have caused or all the disappointment—God simply sees you, his child.
God made you, sustained you, and simply is not going to give up on you.
When we look at the story of Scripture, from Genesis to the Gospels, we see a God whose holiness is full of surprises, constantly amazing us with how much deeper his love is.
How Jesus Shows Us Holiness
Indeed, we keep reading, and we learn that God so loved the world that he came in the form of a baby, the Holy One of Israel, God Immanuel, God with us, as Matthew says. And Jesus continued this work of surprising people with the holy-different love of God.
Jesus did things like touch an unclean woman, but in doing so, he healed her.
Jesus did things like invite the riff-raff of society, the folks the religious leaders saw as disgusting and degenerate—Jesus invited these people over for dinner and ate with them.
And while these things got Jesus in a lot of trouble, we have to look at these stories and ask, if Jesus truly is the holy one, God himself, how are these actions showing us the true meaning of holiness? It is a holiness that is radical compassion. It is a holiness that says, “I am not afraid to get my hands dirty to show you that you are loved.”
And in the most surprising act, Jesus goes to the cross. God incarnate, who came as the messiah of God’s people, chose to come and die on an executioner’s cross.
At the cross, we know God is with us because, God became a godforsaken corpse. The holiness of God was found in the place viewed as the very opposite of God. Cursed is anyone who hangs on a tree, one scripture says. God chose to be there in order to say that there is no place God is not with us.
God died in the place of a sinner to say nothing separates us from God.
God’s love binds Godself to our fate, saying, “I love you so much that if you are lost in the death of sin, I will be with you there.” What happens to you happens to me, and that is how I will prove to you what love I have for you. Through this I will show you the hope of resurrection.
Why? Because God is a holy God, different from all our expectations of what God should be.
When we are lost in sin, when we expect God to condemn us, when we deserve nothing less, the holiness of God appears.
Let me tell you a story. Perhaps you have heard it before. There once was a woman who said she had visions of Jesus. The bishop of the area heard that one of his older parishioners was claiming to have had visions of Jesus, and so he, quite skeptically, goes to investigate. He tells this woman, “This is how I will know that your visions are authentic: ask Jesus, ‘What were the sins I confessed in my last confession?’” The woman agreed to ask Jesus this.
Sometime later, the woman claimed to have another vision of Jesus, and so the bishop went to investigate. The bishop stepped into her house and said, “Well, did you ask Jesus my question?”
The woman answered, “Oh yes. Come sit.” At this, the bishop grew afraid and sat down trembling. The woman took the bishop’s hand in hers, and said, “I asked Jesus what were your last sins you confessed. And he told me, ‘Tell him that I don’t remember.’”
That is the holiness of Jesus.
In our worst moments, God shows us his best. When we are farthest from God, that is when God chooses to be nearest to us.
Living as a Holy People
And this causes us to ask ourselves: how are we to live out this kind of holiness? God says to be holy as I am holy. How do we do that?
We all know that other version of holiness. Baptists had a rhythm I heard growing up: “We don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t chew, and we don’t date girls who do.” That list of no’s was considered what holiness was, and certainly, there is truth to some of that. There are things that are not good for us. Sure, but if that is all holiness means, we have missed the point.
However, holiness in the way that Hosea witnessed and Jesus modeled has a whole lot more to do with what we are willing to do so that others can know that they are loved by God in the way we have seen in our own lives.
A life of holiness says I have encountered a God who is remarkably there for me and so I am free of the obstacles in myself that keep me from being there for you, even if these obstacles come from my religion.
I realized this one day when I was pastoring in Sudbury. Early on, a friend of mine, an Anglican priest, sat me down for coffee, and he gave me the most astute observation about the city I would learn for my ministry there. “Spencer,” he said, “Sudbury is not an unchurched town. It is a de-churched town.” What he meant by that was simply that most of the people I met in Sudbury had grown up in church or had some bad experience with one of the churches in town. However, as I realized, this meant nearly everyone I met knew what Christianity was basically about but had been burned by a judgmental church or cut loose by a pastor who clearly thought it best to go after less time-consuming sheep.
They knew Jesus, but how Jesus was modeled to them said that God was no different than all the other conditional forms of love in their lives.
I remember talking to one pastor who proudly admitted that he took his holiness so seriously he rarely hung out with non-Christians…hmmm…Well you can imagine churches like that have a lot of people fall through the cracks.
I said to myself, you know this whole game churches have been playing for all these years. It is great at attracting people whose lives are relatively put together, but if we are really going to reach people in need, we have to be different.
I adopted two rules that I felt were necessary to pastor in these parts: one was I believed that the love of God convicts people of sin. I don’t need to condemn folks or finger-wave. Enough Christians have already done that to them and a good deal of people I encountered were much harsher on themselves than I could ever be. So, I would be different. I would let the love of God convict people.
Two, if someone needed help in my town, even if it seemed like they never stepped foot in my church at all, I was going to do my best to help them. Believe it or not, I was criticized for this. One pastor I knew thought that was foolish. You aren’t going to grow the church that way, he said.
One day, I took a few guys to the food bank, and afterward, I invited them out for coffee at the local Tim Hortons. One guy remarked beforehand that he was on new medication, and he just did not feel like himself.
Well, over coffee, our conversations took an unexpected turn. They, one guy started going on about he realized that Snoop Dog is probably named Snoop Dog because he actually looks like a real dog. The other guy found that remark offensive and told him that he did not care for what he said. The first guy kept going, “No, no, no, I am not being racist or anything. I am just saying. He looks like a dog; that’s why he’s called Snoop Dog.”
Before I knew it, a chair was flung across the room, and the two guys were up in each other’s faces, yelling. Meanwhile, the third guy just sat there with a dopey grin on his face. Turns out he was sauced the whole time. To all of this the manager yelled, “Get out, all of you, and don’t come back. You’re banned from here.” She motioned at all of us.
We all walked out. I was stunned and a little bit mad. Did I just get banned from the only coffee shop in town? I turned to the two guys and said, you need to go in there and fix this.
So, they tried to go back in and plead with the manager to unban them. A minute or two went by. The manager came out, looked at me, and motioned that she wanted to speak with me. “So, they tell me you are their pastor.”
Sheepishly, I said, “By God’s grace, I supposed I am.” And I promised her that if I could keep them in check, they could keep coming around.
I remember coming out of that Tim Hortons, a bit annoyed, and looking at those guys. It was that look in their eyes, “Is this it for us? Is this where pastor spencer just says this is too much trouble; I’m going to focus my energies on more deserving folk?”
At that moment, I realized that the witness of holiness for them wasn’t really about whether I was a morally perfect person (which, of course, I am not,) nor was it about all the things I don’t do. In a moment where it seemed quite natural to be mad and storm off, holiness was saying, “I am not going to give up on you.”
God says, “I am God and not like a mortal. I am the Holy One. I choose to be in your midst, not far away. And I have chosen not to come in wrath.”
And so, we who have encountered this love, this holiness, how we will live so that we say with our lives, “I am not perfect, but I have been encountered by a God who sees us all as his children.”
Holiness says I keep messing up, but God is the kind of God that simply does not give up on us.
Holiness says I have ignored God, ran from him, acted like he does not exist, but God is simply the kind of God that chooses to be with us, no matter what.
Holiness says I am here today because God is a God very different than what I expected.
And our message as a holy people is simply this: because God is different, that is why I will not give up on you.
Let’s pray…
We’ve Missed The Point: Ascension and the Meaning of the Bible
Preached at Lawrencetown United Baptist Church, Ascension, 2024
Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised, so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.” Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and they were continually in the temple blessing God. (Luke 24:44-53, NRSV)
There was a movie that came out a few years ago called The Book of Eli. It starred two great actors, Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman. The movie takes place in a time when the world has been destroyed in an apocalyptic event, possibly a nuclear war. The survivors believed that the old ways in some way caused these events, so in anger, they burned all books, particularly religious books.
Many years later, the world is dark and chaotic, made up of brutal tribes. Only a few elderly people know how to read, let alone know about religion and books like the Bible.
A man named Eli (played by Washington) emerges, walking along the road to somewhere with the last Bible in existence. And he believes he is on a mission from God to bring it to a place God has shown him.
As he passes through one town amongst the desolate wastes, a warlord named Carnegie (played by Oldman) learns that he has the last Bible. He, too, is an old survivor. He remembers, as a boy, seeing televangelists on TV and how much power they had by invoking that they were speaking words from God himself. He remembers his own mother, a struggling single mother, desperate, sending money to a televangelist, money she did not have, and telling him that faith is the most powerful force out there.
Carnegie wants this power: the power to control desperate people. He realizes that the power to speak on behalf of God could allow him to rule unquestioned.
So, he sets out to get this last Bible from Eli.
Two Ways of Using the Bible
The movie sets up a stark contrast between Eli and Carnegie. Both want to use the Bible but for two very different purposes.
In fact, there is a scene in the movie where Eli is sitting there reading the Bible in an inn, and a woman comes to him, sent by Carnegie (she is his slave), and she tries to seduce him in order to get this prized possession.
Instead of taking her up on that offer or condemning her, he turns and has compassion. He sees in her despair over life. So, he encourages her to be thankful and to cherish her life as something valuable, a gift. The woman is confused and admits she doesn’t think that her life is worth anything. But she asks, how do I do that?
So Eli takes her hands and folds them and tells her there is this old practice called prayer, which is something you can do to be thankful and have hope. He teaches her to recite these ancient words: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…” He tells her about the words of the book he reads, that these words are the words of hope and love.
Instead of condemning her or using her, he uses the Bible to give her hope.
Now, in one of the more entertaining but theologically unsound aspects of the movie, when Carnegie comes after Eli, we realize that Eli has God’s supernatural protection. What kind of divine protection, you ask? Good question: Eli has supernatural gun-fighting skills, slaying a small army’s worth of Carnegie’s men when they come at him. I feel like the writers of this movie may have missed a passage or two from the New Testament.
Or, maybe this is trying to allude back to someone like Samson in the Old Testament. Maybe I may have missed one of the lesser-known spiritual gifts in the New Testament. Or, maybe this is just a movie made by Hollywood, and we all know guns and explosions sell tickets.
Be that as it may, the movie is not perfect, but it draws attention to an aspect of this narrative we read today: The resurrected Jesus, just before he ascends to the Father in victory and vindication, opens the eyes of the disciples and they see how the scriptures are fulfilled in him, in his cross and resurrection, fulfilled in his way.
This is something Luke is trying to impress on us from chapter one of his Gospel: The Bible does not make sense without seeing it through Jesus and his love and hope for the least of this world.
You see, Eli and Carnegie represent two ways of thinking about faith and the Bible. Both want to use the Bible, and both have an idea of the authority of God, but their approaches couldn’t get any more different.
One wants to use the Bible for power, control, to bring himself closer to God over others. There are folks in the Gospel that want to do this, whether it is the Pharisees or even Jesus’ disciples. Jesus talked about the kingdom of heaven, and his disciples, James and John, immediately saw Jesus as a pathway to power and status. That is not what Jesus was about. Jesus said, “I came not to be served but to serve and to give my life as a ransom for many.” He also said, “If you want to be my disciples, you have to take up your cross and follow me.”
So, there is also the way Eli uses the Bible: to use the Bible to bring others closer to God, bring hope, compassion, and encouragement. You see that happen in Luke’s Gospel: Jesus heals on the Sabbath; Jesus eats with tax collectors and sinners; Jesus proclaims justice and liberation.
Again, both want to use the Bible, and so, in the loosest possible sense of the term, both want to be “biblical,” but I think we all know that just because someone can quote the Bible does not actually mean they are using the Bible for what it was meant for.
One uses the Bible in a way that points to who Jesus is and what Jesus was about. The other does not.
This is a part of the epiphany the disciples had to learn on that day all those years ago, and it is what our eyes must be awoken to today if we are going to be faithful Christians of our ascended Lord today.
Ascension and the Lesson Jesus Wanted His Disciples to Know
So, it was Ascension this week. If you don’t know what Ascension is, it is the day of the year that traditionally Christians remember Jesus being taken up to heaven after he was resurrected, celebrated 40 days after Easter.
For some reason, we don’t give gifts. We don’t have a turkey. We don’t even eat chocolate eggs (However, some of us still have chocolate eggs hidden from our kids from Easter, mind you). For some, the day of Ascension comes and goes without us realizing it, usually because it coincides with Mother’s Day (Happy Mother’s Day, by the way). Despite it being the conclusion of the Gospels, the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry, it just never seemed to have caught on the way Christmas, the beginning of the Gospels, did. Nevertheless, it is a day in the Christian calendar all the same and it is worth celebrating.
After the crucifixion and the resurrection, Jesus finally helps them see all that they did not understand but can now know in hindsight. He gives them new eyes to see and new ears to hear what is going on in the Bible.
Ascension is that pivotal point where Jesus brings his earthly ministry to a conclusion before going up to heaven and reigning as our mediator at the right hand of the Father, and it seems that Luke is keen to tell us several times here that Jesus explains how the scriptures are fulfilled in him.
We see this in the passage before, where two of Jesus’ disciples are walking on the road to Emmaus and the resurrected Jesus appears to them and walks with them, and they don’t know it is him. They lament how the prophet Jesus was killed. They were disappointed because they really thought he could have been the Messiah.
They thought that Jesus was going to rise up and kill the Romans, liberate the people, and restore the kingdom of God that way, with violence. So, obviously, the cross, the execution of Jesus at the hands of both the Romans and the religious leaders of Israel kind of kiboshed that.
Or did it?
Luke tells us that Jesus revealed himself to them and explained to them along the road to Emmaus how the whole of the Old Testament scriptures pointed to him, to him going to the cross and rising again.
The cross, its brutality and shame, its lowliness and powerlessness—it did not disprove Jesus as the Messiah; it fulfilled it. To us church folk two thousand years later, we don’t consider just how contradictory this probably sounded: A crucified messiah was an oxymoron, like “jumbo-shrimp.”
The law says that anyone who hangs on a tree is cursed. Surely, God cannot be with a man who dies a death like that. Surely, God would protect a true Son of God from such evil. And surely, no one who claimed equality with God could be anything other than a blasphemer if this happened to them. That was what the assumption was.
But as Jesus went to the cross, as all the Gospel writers tell in different ways, Jesus was speaking the words of the Psalms, embodying the patterns the prophets lived, fulfilling in his very body what the Word of God is truly about.
“Why have you forsaken me?” That is a line from David in Psalm 22, who wondered where God was to protect him and the innocent righteous. And yet, to have Jesus speak these words, who claimed to be at one with God, here was God identifying in solidarity with all those who feel forgotten by God.
The disciples could not get their heads around this. This was not supposed to happen in their minds. He could not be the messiah if this happened.
Yet, when you look at the narratives of the Old Testament, you see the truth of the cross. You see Joseph, whose honestly lands him in prison. You see David, whose anointing as king means he spent his early years hunted and hated. You see Job, who endures pain and tragedy to show that he loves God for no benefit. You see Jeremiah, who is branded a traitor, shoved down a well to die, and exiled, all for speaking God’s words.
You see the truth of the cross in the Old Testament: that the good, the just, and the innocent often suffer in this world and are attacked and scorned by the powers of sin.
This leads so many of us to ask: Is evil winning in this world? Is there anything we can do? Is love and hope in vain?
One writer put it this way: Biblical faith makes us realize that if you have not loved, you have not fully lived, but if you love fully, you will probably end up dying for it.
That is what happened to Jesus. Jesus came proclaiming the kingdom of heaven, that the first will be last and the last will be first, that God is here for the humble and the humiliated, the pure and the peacemaker, the merciful and those in mourning.
Jesus came preaching that the law is summarized in love, and the powers and the principalities felt threatened and killed him for it. Jesus’ own people, the leaders of his own religion, saw what he was saying as blasphemous. Yet even in the execution of the cross, the worst evil the people could do to God’s messiah, Jesus is shown praying for them: “Father, forgive them; they know not what they do.”
The cross is the moment when the evil in the human heart and society shows its ugly head, and God chooses this moment to show us in Jesus the kind of God he is: A God willing to love us and die for us.
God loves us with his very best, even when we are at our very worst.
Evil did not have the final say over Jesus that day, nor does it have the final say over history, nor does it have the final say over you, your life, your future.
Jesus rose from the grave. Death, the devil, the powers of disobedience and despair, oppression, and bigotry were overthrown by victorious love.
Today is Ascension, and Ascension means who Jesus is and where Jesus is now, which means that love and not hate are in control of this world.
Grace, not domination, is what wins in the end.
Forgiveness, not fear, is what prevails.
That is the point of the Bible.
From creation to covenant, from exodus to exile, from tabernacle to temple, from Moses, the judges, the kings, and the prophets, the whole Old Testament was preparing God’s people for Jesus. All its figures, its imagery, its laws, its longing, all were anticipations of Jesus.
Jesus is who the whole of the scriptures, the law, and the prophets have been longing for.
Putting it this way says something about what the Bible is all about that we need to remember in this age so badly.
It is not merely that some of it points to Jesus. Jesus insists that it all points to him that Jesus’ way fulfills the deepest concerns about what the Bible seeks to teach.
We Have Missed the Point
It is sad to say this, but we Christians have not been particularly good at keeping this in mind. We so often lose the plot of the Bible and use it in ways that do not fit its purpose of pointing to Jesus and Jesus’ way.
Let me give you some examples:
My mom, bless her soul, had a book she read when I was little. I’d say she read it religiously, but that pun might be too on the nose. It was called the Maker’s Diet. Some authors combed through the Bible, arguing that if you want to live a long and healthy life, all you need to do is follow the Bible’s God-given recipe for healthy eating. Now, there is obvious wisdom to the dietary laws of the Old Testament in its own day and age – I am not disputing that – sure, these laws were to aid in maintaining the health of Israel, and certainly, God wants us to be healthy today, but the idea we could sift those laws out of the ancient world and drop them into our own. The purpose of the Bible isn’t a diet book.
When I was in high school, a book called “The Bible Code” came out. Do you remember the Bible Code? Some believed that since the Bible is divine revelation, there are obviously hidden messages and prophecies in it, sort of like how people believed that if you played a rock band’s LP in reverse back in the ’60s, you hear a secret message. Well, the Bible Code took all the letters of the Bible, and lined them up in a long ribbon and searched every other letter or every fifth letter and things like that, and lo and behold, some of the search results came up with things like “JFK, plot” or “Japan, bomb” or things like that. This was a sensation that became a best-seller, but unsurprisingly, when others found similar results from other long books like Moby Dick or War and Peace, the sales kind of tanked. Again, that is kind of a silly example, but I still know people who come to the Bible and treat it more like a crystal ball or, in particular, the Book of Revelation, some kind of mystical code to crack. That isn’t the point of the Bible.
Again, those are silly, more short-lived examples, but Christians throughout church history have come to the Bible to get the fast answers on a lot of subjects rather than discerning difficult matters with the wisdom the whole of the Bible is trying to instill.
People in the 1500s believed you could teach science right out of the Bible, and for them, the Bible clearly taught that the sun revolved around the earth. Then, a guy named Copernicus and his student Galileo came along, and it has been a bit messy between science and faith ever since. However, the point of the Bible is not science; it is an ancient text written before people had science. It does not tell us much about the what or how of nature, but it tells us why and, more importantly, who. Look at the references to Genesis 1 in the New Testament—passages like “In the beginning… was the Word”—and you realize that if you were to ask what the doctrine of creation the Apostles had, they would have answered, “It’s Jesus.”
For centuries, Christians believed that you could build a system of government using the Bible and that, of course, it was a monarchy or possibly a holy empire where the leader had unquestioned divine-ordained authority. But then religious dissenters came around, like Baptists and others, and said maybe a wise way to do government is to have leaders accountable to the vote of the people. Maybe if Jesus is king, we need to be a bit suspicious of giving anyone god-like authority.
Of course, the examples can get a whole lot darker from there.
Some folks came to the Bible thinking they found a timeless way to run their households, and the result was centuries of slavery and subservience of women, completely ignoring the context of a lot of these passages. If you have ever wrestled with those passages, you have to ask yourself: if the point of the Bible is Jesus giving up his power to liberate others from sin and injustice, it just does not make a lot of sense that we could use this passages today to control and limit others. That is not the point of the Bible.
When settlers came to this land centuries ago, they saw themselves as just as the Israelites entering a new promised land; the only problem with that is that this allowed them to treat the indigenous peoples of this land similar to how the Israelites responded to the Canaanites. In the name of saving people’s souls, Christians oppressed indigenous bodies. In the name of getting people to heaven, Christians did the opposite of the ways of the kingdom of heaven.
And if you read the reasons why people did these things, as I have studied, you will surely find passages quoted with pious intentions. That is a scary thing. It is a frightening reminder that the best of us is capable of terrible things when we lose sight of the center of Scripture.
They did these things because they failed to ask themselves that if the Bible is God’s word, how would Jesus, the word of God in the flesh, want these words to be spoken? How did Jesus live these words for us to follow?
Whether it is the smooth manipulative messages of televangelists, the crazy conjectures of conspiracy theorists, the justifications of war and corruption by world leaders, or the bigotry of some bible thumpers, we know that we are terribly prone to using the Bible in ways that don’t point to Jesus.
In fact, Jesus warns about this in his own day. When he speaks with Pharisees in John’s Gospel, in chapter 5, he says this: “You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life.”
Jesus is talking to some religious people who know their Bibles really well, but they don’t seem all that gracious and loving with it, and since they are refusing to read the scriptures through Jesus, culminating in Jesus, they have failed to grasp its most important message: the message of true life.
Paul does something similar in 2 Cor. 4: “We have renounced the shameful, underhanded ways; we refuse to practice cunning or to falsify God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we commend ourselves to the conscience of everyone in the sight of God.”
Notice what Paul is saying there. He is saying that there are folks who, by the very way, are using the scriptures, using the message of the Gospel, using it for personal gain and power and manipulation; Paul says they have falsified God’s word. Sure, they might be able to quote the Bible, but if they aren’t doing it in the way Jesus would say it, then it is not the words of Jesus. Simple as that.
Perhaps you have had a discussion like this with someone. Somehow, the conversation turns to talking about a serious topic, and instead of listening and appreciating how complicated a problem can be, the person just turns and says, “The Bible clearly says,” end of story. Thoughtfulness need not apply.
Sometimes, I have literally heard people say, “I’d love to be more loving or gracious on this matter, but the Bible won’t let me.” Yet, the law of love is the rule Jesus tells us to measure what law applies and which ones do not. Every Gospel, as well as Paul and James, all report this. I have news for you. If the Bible is preventing you from being more loving, you are reading it wrong.
Usually, when I have those discussions, I end up saying to myself, “Why didn’t we just keep talking about the weather or how our local sports team was doing? Why did I have to open my give mouth?”
We, Disciples, Must Be Different
And yet, I so deeply believe that if we want to follow Jesus, if we care about the Bible, we must study it with the care that it deserves. This does not mean we all have to be academics, although that is what I have been called to, and I try to serve in teaching as best I can. For many of us, it simply means we have to take the time to wrestle and contemplate who Jesus is and what his will is with all the wisdom we have available to us.
That might sound like a tall order, but the consequence of failing to live Scripture out in a way that points to Jesus is one tragic display all around us.
I have realized that if you want to justify pride and power, privilege and prejudice, if you want to condone violence and hatred or reinforce apathy and inaction, you can go to the Bible and cobble together proof texts here and there until you have a surprising case for whatever you want.
C. S. Lewis, the great Christian thinker and novelist, wrote this in a letter:
“It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him. We must not use the Bible as a sort of encyclopedia out of which texts can be taken for use as weapons.”
Today, in terrible ways, we are seeing the Bible used as a weapon. Make no mistake: hundreds of thousands of people have died this year because people have justified their violence with Bible verses.
And rather than give up on the Bible, on faith, or the church, we who are Jesus’ disciples, his students, must show the world otherwise.
You see these scriptures, these documents that Christians in time collected into 66 books, two testaments, bound and printed. These scriptures are a remarkable tool for the church to stay on the right path and understand who Jesus is. These scriptures are, as Paul says in 2 Timothy, “God-breathed,” animated with the Spirit of life who is seeking to transform every soul into the fullness of life with God.
But never forget that these words, these pages, don’t make sense and, in fact, can do profound damage when we stop reading them for how they point to a God that loves humanity, every human being, with a love that forgives every sin, knows every pain, a love that is willing to die sin’s death and yet heal every wound, a love that refuses to stop until God is all in all.
If we don’t listen for that voice speaking, that love breathing through the pages of the Scriptures, we have missed the point.
And so, Lawrencetown Baptist Church, on this Ascension Sunday, may you know that in Jesus Christ, his cross, and resurrection, the scriptures have been fulfilled.
May your eyes be opened, and may you hear afresh how in Jesus Christ we have forgiveness of sins, the fullness of love and truth and grace.
May we be witnesses of this good news, the Gospel that is for all people: comfort for the discouraged, liberation for the oppressed, hope for this broken world.
May we, by God’s help, have the faith to take up our crosses and the courage to live these words out this week.
Let’s pray,
Almighty and everlasting God
you raised our Lord Jesus Christ
to your right hand on high.
As we rejoice in the culmination of Jesus’ earthly ministry,
Imprint your word upon our hearts and minds so that we more every day be conformed to the image of your Son Jesus Christ.
Teach us to love like him. Teach us to be truthful like him.
Teach God, even though we so often forget.
Ready us for Pentecost and fill us with his Spirit,
that we may go into all the world
and faithfully proclaim the Gospel and welcome your coming kingdom.
We ask through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, forever and ever. Amen.
“Our Crosses Are So Shiny”: Christian Faith and the Seduction of Power and Privilege
Preached at Billtown Baptist Church, Sunday, February 25, 2024.
Scripture reading: Mark 10:17-45 NRSV
Introduction: The Life of Clarence Jordan
There was a Baptist pastor named Clarence Jordan. Has anyone heard of him? He was born in 1912, and he died in 1969. Jordan was from Georgia (By the way, a fun fact about me is that my grandmother, my Father’s mother, hailed from Georgia). He was born into wealth and privilege, but at an early age, he felt a profound call to help others. He did his education in agriculture in 1933, so this is during the great depression, and he did this because he believed he could help farmers develop more scientific ways of farming at a time when poverty was widespread across the land. But as he was doing this, he became increasingly convinced that his calling was in ministry. He saw poverty as just as much an economic problem as a spiritual one. So, he did a master’s as well as a Ph.D. in New Testament. Challenged by his in-depth studies of the New Testament, he came to realize that the teachings of Jesus were simply incompatible with racial segregation that was not only tolerated in his community but also taught in the churches. God put it on his heart to do something about this.
In 1942, Jordan and his wife, along with a couple of former missionaries, bought a 440-acre chunk of land. Jordan used the savings he had received from his affluent background to do this. They called the farm “Koinonia,” after the Greek word in the New Testament for the community, and they founded this community on the refusal of racism, violence, and greed. They opened up their community in hospitality to anyone who might come who needed a place to stay, in particular, black people who were fleeing abuse. There, at the farm, people could live for a time, learn how to work the land, learn skills like how to fix and build things and leave when they were back on their feet.
For almost ten years, Koinonia did its work, living in a radical community largely unnoticed by those around it. However, when the civil rights campaigns began in the 50s and 60s, Koinonia became a target. The community was a church part of the Southern Baptist Convention, but it was disfellowshipped for its “communist race-mixing.” However, as it has now been brought to light, many people in the South, many Baptists included, were members of the KKK at the time, and these individuals saw what Jordan was doing and saw his community as a threat to God’s order of things.
In fact, some tried to organize a boycott so that the farm would no longer receive oil in the winter. The oil delivery people were threatened as they confessed to Jordan. “I could lose my business if my other customers boycott me for supplying you,” one man said. Jordan would respond back, “You know we have children on the farm. Do you want people to freeze during the winter?” After the man protested, Jordan put it this way: “The choice is clear: lose your business or lose your soul.” He had a no-nonsense way of putting things.
However, that man had reason to fear. As tensions escalated, so did the violence. The community experienced several bombings, and even members of the farm were fired upon folks from the adjacent farm. The buildings of Koinonia farm were bullet-ridden from folks firing at the buildings, trying to intimidate those inside.
By the way, if we somehow believe that terrorism is a problem for other religions and not us, go ahead and google the history of “Christian terrorist groups.” You might be, unfortunately, surprised by what some people have justified in the name of Jesus.
In dire need, Clarence Jordan appealed to his brother, Robert Jordan, a lawyer who later went on to become a senator and judge. Clarence Jordan recorded their conversation:
“Clarence, I can’t do that. You know I have my political aspirations. Why, if I represent you, I might lose my job, my house, everything I got.”
“We might lose everything too, Bob.”
“It’s different for you.” (As if to say, you are one of those weird religious types that actually takes this stuff seriously).
“Why is it different? I can remember, it seems to me, that you and I joined the church the same Sunday as boys. I expect that when we came forward, the preacher asked me the same question he did you. He asked me, “Do you accept Jesus as your lord and savior.” And I said, “Yes. What did you say?”
“I follow Jesus, Clarence, to a point.”
“Could that point by any chance be, Bob, the cross?”
“That’s right. I follow him to the cross, but not on the cross. I am not getting myself crucified.
“Then I don’t believe you’re a disciple. You’re an admirer of Jesus but not a disciple of his. I think you ought to go back to the church you belong to and tell them that you’re an admirer, not a disciple.”
“Well, now, if everyone who felt like I did do that, we wouldn’t have a church, would we?”
“The question,” Clarence said, “is ‘Do you have a church then?’”
Would that even be a church at all?
Eventually, Jordan had to close down his farm and leave the area. He eventually came to be the mentor of a young Baptist politician named Jimmy Carter (if you have not heard of Clarence Jordan, I hope you have heard of Jimmy Carter). Carter went on to become the governor of Georgia and helped dismantle segregation. He then went on to become President, and after that, he formed a charity, inspired by Clarence Jordan’s witness to housing the less fortunate, called Habitat for Humanity.
The Difference between Merely Believing in Jesus and Taking Up the Cross
So, if you have been tracking with us in this series, we have been reflecting on the life of Christ. We have been going through his teachings and major ideas about who he is.
The last time I spoke, I noted that there were folks today who tend to think the apostles invented Jesus as a divine messiah as time went on. But as I said, when you look at some of the earliest stories about Jesus, some of the earliest writings of the Apostles, Jesus seems to be doing things that only God could do. While this was surely a mystery, something the Apostles admitted they did not fully understand, Christian thinkers have looked back at these narratives and suggested it looks like Jesus had two natures, that in all the ways God is God, Jesus is God, and in all the ways humans are human, Jesus is human, and that doctrinal rule is the best summary or encapsulation of what is going on in all these rich and multifaceted stories in the New Testament.
And so, Christians throughout history have insisted that Jesus is very human and very God and that this truth is essential to understanding God’s love and presence in our lives. It is a matter of what is called “orthodoxy,” meaning “right belief.”
Now, there is also a truth that Clarence Jordan’s life and experiences show us that gets to the core of what our passage today is trying to tell us, which suggests to us another layer or facet to this exercise we call “believing.” You see, understanding who Jesus is necessarily means changing how we live, and more than that, in particular, it confronts how we understand privilege, status, and power. However, this part of our convictions is much harder to measure. Some things can only be lived and shown.
It is one thing to believe in Jesus, quite another to live like Jesus.
It is one thing to believe all the right things. It is quite another to believe in the right way.
Or worse, we can actually use our sense of believing in Jesus as a means of getting power, staying in power, and staying comfortable.
To be a Christian means, as James and John show us, we must be aware that there are ways we can use believing in Jesus to get out of living the cross.
The Rich Young Ruler: Piety Masking Privilege
Our passage today begins with Jesus being approached by a rich ruler, who runs to meet Jesus and kneels down to him, asking, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” This question sets up the whole section, as we will see. Jesus is rightly skeptical. Nearly all in the ruling class at the time did so by exploiting and extorting the poor peasants, and to have this man come to Jesus acting this way looks like a display of theatrical flattery. “Why do you call me good?” Jesus inquires.
Jesus responds to his question, telling him to follow the commands of God, which the ruler proudly announces he has been following them just fine since his youth. That is doubtful. Then, Jesus hits him with a request: “If you want eternal life, sell everything you have, give it to the poor, and come and follow me.” The ruler could not do it. Apparently, he has been living out this holier-than-thou mentality, but that has really been a cover for greed, materialism, and exploitation, and Jesus sees right through it.
It is funny how we treat our sins as the ones that are easily excused while another’s sins are the real bad ones.
The disciples see this man leave dejected, and Peter turns to Jesus and says that they have left their homes and families to follow Jesus. To which Jesus responds, “Many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.”
That statement is one of Jesus’ most important teachings. It is really at the core of what his teaching on the kingdom of God is all about.
It seems this story that happens just before our passage today sets up a contrast between the disciples, who are poor but also, for the sake of following Jesus, give up home and family (and, as we know, eventually their lives) and a man that has power and wealth who cannot part with it, yet believes he is fully obedient to God.
It seems that for some, being a member of God’s people is a way of getting us off the hook for the really difficult stuff.
For some, being generally good and generally obedient is a way of getting off the hook for being radically and totally obedient.
It seems that this rich ruler has used his sense of faith and piety to make sure he stays first in this world. It is something we can all do. We can use our faith and our beliefs to reinforce and prop up our position in our communities and our jobs, to elevate ourselves, and to absolve us from doing the things God is challenging us to live: things like deep humility, radical justice, self-sacrificial love, etc.
James and John’s Request: Seeking Power through Jesus
So, Jesus continued on his way but started to talk about what was going to happen to him. Jesus knows that trouble is coming. He tells them that soon he is going to be betrayed. He is going to be arrested, tortured, and killed, all by the religious establishment and Rome, yet he tries to say to them, I will rise again.” Evil will not have the final say.
There is a saying by one theologian that goes like this: “At the core of the Christian faith is this paradox: it holds that if you do not love radically, you have not fully lived. However, if you do love radically, the world may end up killing you for it.” That is exactly what happened to Jesus, and here he is, trying to get his disciples to understand this.
After he tells them this, however, John and James, two brothers, come to Jesus with an unusual request. It sounds like they really only heard that last part about Jesus rising again in vindication and victory. They ask Jesus: when you come into your kingdom, can you make us your first and second in command?
And Jesus turns to them. Did you not just hear all that I said about what was going to happen to me? Do you still think my kingdom is about getting power?
Do you still think following me is about staying comfortable and not having to sacrifice status? Do you still not get it? He says, “You know the world has rulers,” not unlike the one Jesus just chatted with, “who lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you.” James and John try to exploit their connection to Jesus as a way of getting power and prominence over others. “Do you still not get what my kingdom is about?”
My kingdom, as Jesus says in Matthew 5, is for the poor in spirit, the meek and humble, those broken in mourning, those that hunger and thirst for justice, those who are merciful and pure in heart and peaceful, and those that hold to the truth and to justice even if it costs them.
My kingdom is for those who are last in this world, those who make themselves last, sacrificing wealth and status, and those who take up their cross and follow me. Do you still not get it?
Our Temptations to Power
Do we not get it still today? Sadly, this temptation of James and John’s does not go away in Christianity. We see this temptation again and again.
Whether it is the rise of Constantine a few centuries later, where Christianity turned from a marginalized, illegal religion to a culturally dominant religion enforced by the state, since then, Christians have been quite fond of feeling called by Christ to hold power, and this has set a pattern repeated in many Christian empires and nations thereafter.
Sadly, we can see many examples where Christianity became wedded with quests for power and wealth where Christians in the name of Jesus have done things that are categorically against Jesus’ way: the crusades, the Inquisition, colonization, segregation, etc.
Or, sadly, what we are seeing now in the United States, South of the border. To denounce American politics almost feels too easy some days, something best left to jokes around the office water cooler, but the reality is these things are deeply serious. Some of us feel like we just keep watching some TV drama that is so bizarre and brutal it doesn’t feel real, but it is.
Just this week, as more evidence regarding the women the former President has abused comes forward, more evidence that he paid off a porn star comes further to light, as well as his many fraudulent claims in his businesses, as well as his role in inciting insurrection—as all of this continues to mount—the former President held a rally to garner further Christian support. His words sent chills down my spine as he promised that support for him would be rewarded with him making Christians powerful and prominent in ways never seen in this country before. And these words were met with applause and amens and people shouting out, “Thank you, Jesus!”
Again, going after American politics feels like going after the low-hanging fruit, and I feel obliged to say that we in Canada have our own temptations. Who have we supported purely because of the carrots they dangle over our faces?
I would also say that it is not just an American problem. This week, I was invited to sign a letter to the major world Christian leaders as a Baptist theologian in response to the actions of the Russian orthodox church and its continued approval of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Patriarch of Moscow, Kirill, has called the war a divine mandate and has made statements that soldiers who die fighting are given special forgiveness in heaven. Thousands of innocent people are dying because, in the eyes of the Russian Orthodox Church, God desires some kind of restored Holy Russian Empire.
And so one cannot help but notice the irony that these things are being done by an ancient church tradition that has the word “Orthodox” in its title. It reiterates the fact that no form of Christian faith is immune to the seduction of power.
Now, we can do this politically, but this also happens in much more mundane ways.
For instance, when Meagan and I were first married, we attended a Pentecostal church in Newmarket, Ontario. It was a great mission-focused community. We were a part of a young adult’s bible study that grew. It was great. So many young adults started getting back into church as we read through the Bible and prayed for one another. People experienced a renewed sense of Christian community and discipleship.
However, things started going pear-shaped. One evening, one of the leaders of the group brought a DVD they loved on how to be “Blessed.” It was a DVD of a preacher who said that the Christian life is about trying to find God’s blessing, and God’s blessing means, clearly, “getting stuff.”
Meagan and I just looked at each other.
The preacher continued that if you are living in accordance with God’s ways, God blesses you with abundance; it is a sign of his approval of your life.
In fact, he then invited two testimonies of women in the congregation. One said that when they started being obedient, and by that, she meant that she started tithing money to the church, and she reported that God started blessing her husband’s business, and now they are millionaires (and you can, too, apparently). The other, much more modest in her testimony, said, “All I know is that when I give to God on a Sunday morning, then I go to the mall, it is like God opens all the sales at the mall for all things I need and desire. God is raining down his blessing on us.” I am not making this up.
At the end of the DVD, you know I had to pipe up. I said to that group leader, “So what do you do with a bible passage like the saying, ‘Blessed are the poor’ or the one just after it, ‘Woe to you who are rich.’”
The group leader looked at me skeptically and said, “Where is that in the Bible?”
I said, “It is in Luke chapter 6. It is the words of Jesus.”
I would like to tell you that my efforts to challenge that group were successful, but they were not. It ended up being a very disappointing experience for many of us who were in this group that originally set out to study God’s Word but ended up getting hijacked and ruined by all kinds of motives that drew us away from the things that mattered.
Now, some of us might not put it so obtusely as that preacher on that DVD put it, but the fact is there are so many ways we use our faith to stay comfortable. We can back our privilege with Bible verses when we want to, rather than taking up the difficult, costly way of the cross.
It can look like the repulsive theologies that Clarence Jordon confronted where overt racism was preached from the pulpit. It can look like the dirty politics and the mixing of church and state power that we are seeing in the world. It can look like the distorted theologies of blessing that say health and wealth are a sign of divine approval, which suggests that if you are poor, struggling, or sick, you are not loved by God. But it can look so many other ways, too, often covert and concealed, often cloaked with pious concerns.
These are all the ways we can make our faith about us rather than the way of Jesus, all the ways we can use the Bible to reinforce how we ought to come first.
We find ways of saying, “I deserve what I have, and I don’t need to share it. I don’t need to do this or that; I’m good enough. I don’t need to sacrifice for them; that’s their problem…I don’t need to take up the cross to have Jesus.”
The Ransom of the Cross: Jesus Becomes Last for Us
To this, Jesus makes his most explicit statement about the meaning of the cross: “For the Son of man came not to be served by to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
The language of ransom comes out of the book of Exodus, where God acts powerfully against Pharoah, a self-proclaimed god over an oppressive empire, ransoming God’s people out of slavery with signs and wonders.
Jesus is leading us out of slavery into a New Exodus. But what are we enslaved to? Mark’s Gospel makes that explicit: We are enslaved to the forces of darkness and the devil; we are enslaved to the fear of death, but to our own disobedience and despair. We are enslaved to our distorted religiosity just as much as we are to our political enemies.
These two are linked. God wants to liberate body and soul, not just one or the other, and that liberation comes together in things like our social status, where our spiritual pride and our material privilege are linked.
How does Jesus liberate us? By showing us God’s way. The cross is Jesus, the Son of God, the rightful king of Israel, who ought to live in a palace, who ought to command the legions and slay anyone who opposes him. This messiah did not come to be served by to serve, but by challenging oppression with his way, he knew it would end up with execution. It would mean the ultimate sacrifice.
To die by Roman execution would have meant the most humiliating and painful death a person could die: stripped naked, mocked, beaten, and pierced.
The cross is God himself becoming last in this world for us.
The cross is God becoming last in this world, and if we can humble ourselves, repent, and resolve to change by God’s grace and spirit if we live with an openness to the breaking in of God’s kingdom, we can know the promise of the resurrection. Jesus rose again.
The first will be last, and the last will be first.
We can’t have faith in Jesus without the cross.
Even then, Clarence Jordan had a saying. He looked at so much of the piety of the day, the comfortable ways of being Christian, and the tendencies to complain about how we don’t hold power as if we are now persecuted. He says this:
“Our crosses are so shiny, so polished, so respectable that to be impaled on one of them would seem to be a blessed experience.”
I will leave you with this thought: For many of us, our crosses are simply too shiny.
May we, in renewed ways daily, be challenged and convicted to take up Jesus’ cross. Amen.
A Different Kind of Christmas
Introduction: Which Jesus?
Scripture Reading: Matthew 2:1-23 and Luke 2:8-20
I am going to say something controversial: I think the movie, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, is Will Farrell’s funniest movie. Ya, Elf is a modern classic at Christmas. Ya, Anchor Man is probably the most quotable. However, Talladega Nights has a moment in the movie that gives one of the most pointed comments on popular cultural Christianity.
Ricky Bobby is a champion Nascar Driver, and there is a scene at the dinner table where he is instructed by his wife to say grace in order for God to continue to bless them with more Nascar victories.
Rick Bobby prays, “Dear Lord Baby Jesus,” and as he proceeds to thank the baby Jesus for all the good things he has, his wife stops him and says, “Sweetie, you know Jesus grew up, right? It’s kinda weird to pray to a baby.” Rick Bobby responds indignant: “I like the Christmas baby Jesus the best. If you say grace, you can pray to whatever Jesus you want: teenage Jesus, bearded Jesus, whatever.”
After which, his friend chimes in and says, “I like to picture Jesus in a tuxedo T-shirt…because it says, like, I wanna be formal…Right. But I’m here to party, too. Because I like to party, so I like my Jesus to party.”
His son pipes up and says, “I like to picture Jesus as a ninja fighting off evil samurai.”
This goes on for a little bit; Ricky Bobby continues to pray: “Dear 8-pound, 6-ounce, newborn infant Jesus… don’t even know a word yet…just a little infant and so cuddly, but still omnipotent… we just thank you for all the races I’ve won and the 21.2 million dollars…Love that money! Amen.”
Now, I hope no one is offended by my quoting this in church, but while this scene is ridiculous and theologically wrong, it also speaks of a kind of culture that has mixed consumerism with popular Christian religion, the cult of prosperity and achievement, health and wealth, with biblical illiteracy: Jesus is who I like him to be.
According to a 2015 survey by the Barna Group (and admittedly, these are American statistics), people believe the following things on average about Jesus: The vast majority of people believe Jesus was a real person. “More than nine out of 10 adults say Jesus Christ was a real person who actually lived.” However, “Younger generations are increasingly less likely to believe Jesus was God…Most adults—not quite six in 10—believe Jesus was God, while about one-quarter say he was only a religious or spiritual leader like Mohammed or the Buddha. The remaining one in six say they aren’t sure….” There is similar confusion about Jesus’ life: “About half agree, either strongly or somewhat, that while he lived on earth, Jesus Christ was human and committed sins like other people.”
That is perhaps somewhat typical given what we assume about living in a post-Christian culture, but one of the surprising statistics found was that the overwhelming majority of Americans say they have made a commitment to Jesus at some point in their lives.
What does this mean? David Kinnaman, President of Barna Group, commented at the end of the study: “This impressive number begs the question of how well this commitment [to Jesus] is expressed…dedication to Jesus is, in most cases, a mile wide and an inch deep.” As I said, these are American statistics, and you can imagine smaller numbers but similar factors going in for us.
It appears that there are lots of people familiar with Jesus in our culture, but not a whole lot that actually want to follow him. Lots of folks agree that Jesus claimed to be God, but that ultimately means they can carry on with their lives no different than those who don’t.
Pastor Chris and I got together for lunch one day, and out of that conversation came the idea of a series going through moments in Jesus’ life, taken from the four Gospels: His incarnation, core teachings, death, and resurrection, unpacking what these mean. So, that is what we are going to be up to leading up to Good Friday and Easter.
We have made Jesus Safe, Sweet, and Sanitized
Again, while Ricky Bobby is a buffoon in a comedy movie, what he says is brilliant satire. Notice how he prefers the Christmas Jesus, which, for him, means that Jesus is warm and cuddly in a golden diaper. I suspect many of us have a depiction of Christmas, as well as the portrayal of Jesus and his teachings, in our heads that is similarly safe, sweet, and sanitized.
Some of our Christmas Carols don’t help. Take “Away in a Manger”: “The cattle are lowing, the poor baby wakes / But little Lord Jesus, no crying He makes.” Why would someone assume that Jesus, as an infant, did not cry, whether hungry for his mother or because he had a dirty diaper? Isn’t Jesus human in all the ways we are human?
Take “Silent Night”: “Son of God, love’s pure light / Radiant beams from Thy holy face.” I love the song “Silent Night,” but I clench my teeth a bit when it depicts Jesus with beams glowing from him.
“All is calm, all is bright…” Why do we assume everything was calm? According to Luke’s Gospel, Mary, and Joseph got into Bethlehem, and it was so crowded and chaotic that she had to give birth in what is probably most accurately the equivalent of an alleyway, where the household animals were kept and were probably dangerous, loud, and dirty. Jesus is laid to rest not on golden, soft hay but in an animal’s feeding trough (some of you folk know full well what that might look like—it probably had bits of slop in it). Jesus was wrapped not in beautiful, bleached linens, but the word in Greek describes the ragged bands of cloth one used during traveling, wind-torn and caked with sand.
Those are details of Luke’s Gospel, and when we come to the events of Epiphany and the visit of the wise men in chapter 2 of Matthew, we have to admit this story has been packaged and sanitized as well.
By the way, I called it Epiphany—did you know that it is called Epiphany? I didn’t know this until literally four years ago when I preached at another church over the Christmas break, and I spoke on an unrelated scripture and was scolded for not upholding the church calendar, which apparently has 12 days of Christmas like the song says (that always puzzled me growing up—why are there 12 days?—also why does a person’s true love give them a bunch of birds?) I get the golden rings but If my true love gave me “eight geese a-laying,” can’t say I would feel very Christmasy about it. I apologize if I have yet again ruined another Christmas song for you.
Well, Epiphany is the last day of Christmas, twelve days after Christmas day that usually celebrates the next event in the Gospels: the dedication of Jesus in Luke, the coming of the wise men in Matthew, and the baptism in Mark and John, who do not have a birth narrative in them. Again, don’t feel bad if you did not know that. My family still puts the Christmas tree away after New Year’s.
However, as further evidence that we have the idea of Christmas so often packaged to us, in a lot of Christmas scenes, you have the shepherds at the manger scene from Luke’s Gospel with the wise men from Matthew’s. But notice what Matthew says: Jesus was a child when the wise men found Mary and Joseph living in a house in Bethlehem. This is a different timeline from Luke’s version.
Matthew tells the story differently and emphasizes certain things he wants his readers to see about Jesus. The churches of Matthew’s day were facing persecution and expulsion from the Jewish Synagogue: Jewish Christians, who seemed to be Matthew’s audience, were being seen as heretics and apostates for following Jesus. This compounded an already tense state of affairs where the people lived under Roman occupation, under the boot of a tyrannical empire, where violence and oppression were already a daily reality.
Again, we so often present the Christmas scene with clean and calm figures, but that is simply not the case for Matthew’s Gospel, which sets the scene for Christmas with a backdrop of tyrants, intrigue, and a bloodshed. That probably would not go as well on someone’s front lawn with lights and bows. Your front lawn would like that guy by Aldershot School that goes way too far in his Halloween decorations. You know who I am talking about, right?
If any of these elements of the story is a surprise to you as it was to me when I learned about them many years into my adult walk with Christ, I think we all have inherited our own pleasant, packaged, safe, and sanitized version of Jesus.
One reason why we like a safe and sanitized version of the Jesus story is that we don’t have to actually contend with what the Gospel demands.
When I was pastoring First Baptist Church of Sudbury, I had a congregant complain after I preached a sermon mentioning the Charleston shooting. This was in 2015. A deranged white nationalist walked into a church in a black community and killed nine people at prayer, hoping to start a race war. I had someone complain that I was mixing politics and religion in the sermon. I was confused by that criticism because that sermon never mentioned politicians, political parties, voting, or anything of the sort.
I soon found this man, a man raised in the church his whole life and even served as an elder in another church, openly espoused that he did not think Jesus ever spoke about racism or justice and even said to me that he did not think racism was sinful. I soon realized that despite his objection, he very much did mix religion and politics. It was just the worst version of both.
His was an extreme case, but we all so often give into a picture of Jesus, sweet, safe, and sanitized, that absolves us from having to do something about it.
1. A Different Jesus: True Moses, True Israel
But Matthew is different. Matthew presents a different Christmas story and a different Jesus. He is barely done mentioning the birth of Jesus when he starts mentioning the politics of Jesus’ day. It says the people were ruled by King Herod. Herod was a tyrant. Herod was not ethnically a Jew, but he claimed to be a faithful Jew for political purposes, nor did he have a royal lineage. His mother was from Arabia, and his father was an Edomite who found favor with Rome because Rome wanted a puppet king over these lands. Herod remained in power because he was very good at squeezing the people for more tax money to fund the imperial war machine, and he was absolutely ruthless at dealing with any threat to his power. In fact, he killed several close relatives who he thought might challenge his power.
Yet, a group of wise men from the east show up at his door wondering where the new king of the Jews is because a certain star sign has risen. Herod’s title was king of the Jews. You can imagine today’s ambassadors showing up to the White House asking the President, “Hey, we are here to honor your country’s new and true President. Where is he?” Yes, the messiah is political, just not in the way earthly politics want him to be.
Herod tries to trick and scheme, then intimidate and murder his way to stay in power, but God whispers in the dreams of the wise men and of Joseph, and both get out of Bethlehem before it is too late.
Matthew says that the holy family fled the massacre to go to Egypt and that they returned home years later when Herod was dead, coming to reside in Nazareth.
By doing this, Matthew’s story makes two subtle references here that tell us who Jesus is.
Who do we know in the Old Testament that had to escape the slaughter of infants? Moses the man who gave the Jewish people the law. In Matthew’s time, Christians are being attacked because their radical way is seen as a betrayal of the Jewish law, yet here, Matthew wants to say that Jesus is not only like Moses, Jesus is the true Moses. Jesus is showing us the true way to be faithful to God. And so, Jesus says in Matthew, “I have not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it.”
Second, who in the Old Testament came out of Egypt? Israel did. God’s people did. Matthew says that these things were done to fulfill what the prophet said, “Out of Egypt I called my son.” That is a scripture from the prophet Hosea, and if you look at it, Hosea is talking about the people of Israel as God’s child, and Matthew sees this as pointing to Jesus. Again, as Jewish Christians in Matthew’s time were persecuted and excommunicated from their families and friends for worshiping Jesus, Matthew says that Jesus is the true Israel. What God was longing to do with his people, a people set to be a redeeming presence to bless the rest of the world, God is fulfilling this first and foremost through Jesus and Jesus’ way. This is what God’s people are meant to be like.
Now, Christians throughout history have looked at passages like this in Matthew and concluded two problematic things: one is that God is done with the Jewish people or, worse, the Jewish people are evil for rejecting Jesus. This has led to some terrible stuff in church history. Others today do the opposite and look at what the modern state of Israel is doing in Palestine and automatically assume that Christians should support this country because this is biblical Israel. Matthew suggests something different.
If Jesus is the True Moses and the True Israel, God has not forsaken the Jewish people. Paul says the promises of God are irrevocable. Jesus is the very sign that God had refused to give up on his people. However, this also comes with the challenge that God’s people are called to follow God’s ways not the ways of this world, and God’s ways are most clearly shown in Jesus.
2. A Different Way: Jesus’ versus Herod’s
Between God and the world, we all have that choice presented to us.
Jesus’ way is different, and it is in brutal contrast to Herod’s.
Herod’s way of ruling involves lying and scheming, deceiving the wise men.
Herod’s way looks to religion to manipulate and maintain his power.
Herod’s way, worst of all, believes that peace and order are maintained by violence, even killing the innocent.
Herod is an especially cruel tyrant—he was a paranoid psychopath—but Herod’s way of ruling is known all too well:
It is the way that sees truth purely as what one wants it to be.
It is the way that puts one’s comforts always ahead of another’s needs.
It is the way that treats others as objects, valuable only if useful and worthless if not.
It is the way that looks at one’s enemies and sees something only to humiliate or annihilate.
It is the way that looks to God and sees religion as a source of power and God as nothing but the idolatrous echo of one’s ego.
Yet, just one chapter later, we see the contrast to Herod’s way as Jesus begins to announce the kingdom of heaven:
A kingdom not for the people who think they are spiritually rich but for the poor in spirit.
A kingdom not for the prideful and powerful but for the humble and humiliated.
A kingdom not for the compromised and the complicit but the pure and the peacemakers.
A kingdom for those willing to sacrifice for the sake of what is true and right, just as the prophets did.
That is Jesus’ way, and it cannot be reconciled with the way of Herod. Jesus is the narrow path that leads to life, whereas Herod’s way is the wide highway that leads to destruction.
3. Different Seekers
Which way are you on? Will you seek Jesus? In Matthew and Luke, it is surprising who does. Jesus has seekers who are different from what we expect.
The wise men seek Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel. Who are these wise men? Tradition gives them names and says there were three of them, one for each gift, but Matthew offers no specifics. Who are wise men? The word in Greek is “magos,” and it is used in the Old Testament for Pharoah’s magicians that oppose Moses in the Book of Exodus and the officiants of the king in the Book of Daniel. These are not particularly positive references: these men are a king’s astrologers and fortune tellers, and often, a king would send officials like them to honor an allied king. In the year 66 AD, magi from an eastern nation beyond the Roman Empire visited the emperor Nero to honor him.
Whoever Matthew’s magi were, they came to recognize Israel’s true king, even though they had no relationship to God’s covenant with Israel, and they are the ones who found Jesus while Herod and the rest of the people in Jerusalem were clueless. Let’s just appreciate this little irony of the story: When God’s people completely miss their messiah being born on their doorstep, a group of pagan fortune tellers travel across the known world led by an ancient horoscope in the sky, a notion Jews would have regarded as false—everything their religion stood against—but the magi did so to find and honor Jesus.
That might lead us to be a bit more humble in how we speak about people of different beliefs than us. For all we know, they may actually be pursuing Jesus—or Jesus is pursuing them—in ways we have fundamentally missed in our own lives.
In Luke’s Gospel, it is the shepherds who seek Jesus. Shepherding was one of the poorest jobs one could have in that society (and not to mention dangerous, out in the wilderness with the elements, wild animals, and bandits). It was a job for outcasts. The shepherds come and find Jesus, and the angels say that you will find your messiah wrapped in ragged cloth and lying in an animal feeding trough, a manger, and these things will be a sign to you of God’s good news for everyone.
If this event were to happen here, today in Kentville, you can imagine Jesus being born by the dumpers in a parking lot at center square, wrapped in someone’s second-hand coat, and the poor, the drug addicts, the folks that work night shift at the gas station or in the warehouse at Walmart realize if this baby is going to be our leader, things are going to get better, but he’s one of us.
A messiah born into poverty rather than power and privilege: This messiah is good news. He gets us. He is on our side because if God is on the side of the least of us, God is for everyone. And so the shepherds search out Jesus. Will we?
This chapter ends with the full display of what Herod is capable of: a massacre of the children in Bethlehem to try to find and eliminate Jesus. Matthew says this speaks of another prophecy from the book of Jeremiah chapter 31, “Rachel weeping for her children / She refused to be consoled because they are no more.”
Scholars have been puzzled about how this passage is actually a prophecy. It does not actually predict anything specific. It just speaks poetically of Rachel, one of the matriarchs of Israel, weeping over the casualties of the fall of Jerusalem several hundred years before Jesus. These were people slaughtered by the invading Babylonian army, who then carried off the survivors into exile. It speaks of the despair the survivors expressed as they mourned their deceased, walking off into slavery with nothing but ash and rumble behind them. Matthew cites it and by doing so connects their pain with the pain of the victims of tyranny in his day. And by doing so, anyone who read this and knew that scripture would also know what that passage promises to those who have suffered tragedy. The verses before and after proclaim hope. They say,
The Lord will ransom you…
I will turn your mourning into joy;
I will comfort you and give you gladness for sorrow…
There is hope for your future, says the Lord…
I will surely have mercy…
I will satisfy the weary,
And all who are faint I will replenish.
To the victims of tyranny and tragedy, Matthew is saying there is hope. Through Mary and Joseph, through wise men and shepherds, Luke and Matthew have been giving us unlikely examples as signs that if God is with these kinds of people, God is with us all.
To the victims of the violence in the Middle East, to those who have lost so much to the war in Ukraine, to those in Japan sifting through the remnants hit by the earthquake, to the broken and the hurting, the starving and the scared, God is with you. God is for you. God will ransom you. God will restore you. God will have mercy. There is hope.
God’s kingdom is here, and this is good news.
Jesus’ way is different because Jesus isn’t like how the world operates. He does not conform to our assumptions and expectations.
God cannot be bought, boxed in, owned, or sold off. God has come as the gift of grace, unlimited as it is undeserved.
Trust it. Let it sustain you in tough times. Let it transform you. Let it flow through you to transform others.
Let’s pray.
Loving and gracious God revealed in Jesus Christ.
You are God, Immanuel. God with us, God for us.
You lead as the true Moses; you teach us what it means to be Israel.
God, we repent for all the ways we honor you with our lips, but our hearts and our actions are far from you and your ways.
Forgive us and guide us by the leading of your Spirit on the way of Jesus.
We pray for these things in your name, amen.
The More Lost, The More Loved
Are you the kind of person who loses their car keys all the time? Full confession: I am. My wife is giving me that look like, “Oh yes, he is, and it drives me nuts.”
“Honey, where are the car keys?” She has asked.
To which I respond, “Well, they are either on the key hook, or on my dresser, or on my desk, or in my coat pocket, or in my pants pocket from the previous day. It’s a simple list of options, Meagan.” To which she looks at me like that.
It is amazing how important a set of keys can be at the right moment. The other day, I was doing work on our vehicle, and I went into the house. I was in there for a bit, and I realized I had to go somewhere. Where are my keys? Where did I leave them? When I came back out, thinking I might have left them in the vehicle, there they were. I could see them through the glass, but—and you know where I am going with this—the door—I realized out of habit, I locked the door and closed it.
This was a holiday, and so I figured CAA would either not be around or charge an arm and a leg to come or take forever to come. So, I tried to get in the car with a coat hanger and something I was using to wedge the door forward a bit. I came so close to getting the hook on the door handle to open it. So close. I have never wanted to get those keys so bad in my life.
In the end we called CAA. They came pretty quickly. They had a special tool that got the door open in about three seconds.
Anyways, you don’t realize just how important something is until it is lost.
So, as I said last week, Pastor Chris slotted me in for two weeks during his vacation way back when. It was when he was going through his series on the parable of the Prodigal Son, and my thought was to go into some of the parables, particularly the two that occur before the Prodigal Son in Luke chapter 15: the Parables of the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin. These are two parables that I keep coming back to, reflecting on. They go like this:
15 Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. 2 And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” 3 So he told them this parable: 4 “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? 5 And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. 6 And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbours, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my lost sheep.’ 7 Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. 8 “Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? 9 And when she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’ 10 Just so I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
Gospel of Luke 15:1-10, NRSV
I have been enjoying reading a collection of sermons on the parables as I reflect on these passages. It is a book by Howard Thurman. Thurman was a mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr., and his books have been as beautiful as they are challenging for my faith. In his sermon on these parables, he suggests something profound: Sometimes, we take the parables as stories merely about how to get saved, which is an important topic, of course. But let me suggest to you that if you read these parables asking, “What do I do?” You have fundamentally misunderstood it. Thurman pointed out to me that these parables are whole accounts of God’s character in miniature. They are here to tell us what God is like and what God does.
So, the parable asks this question: What is God like? In these parables, Jesus gives us two surprising metaphors that answer this question.
What is God like? God is like a Shepherd
The first might seem obvious or old hat to some of us who have been around the church for a while, but it is surprising because it is loaded with implications. If you look at certain passages in the Old Testament, God is the shepherd of Israel.
But notice something: Jesus is scolded by religious teachers because he is the one eating with the riff-raff of the town. Sinners and tax collectors are coming to him, finding the grace they have never experienced, and religious folk are indignant. To this, Jesus says that God is like a shepherd who goes out and rescues a lost sheep and that heaven rejoices each time one lost sheep is brought home. Who is this heavenly shepherd in this parable, then? Its Jesus. Jesus just gave us a clue about who he is here. Jesus is God Immanuel, God with us.
But notice something further: What is God like if God is like Jesus? Is God the kind of God that loves only his flock? Does God only love the ones that stay in the flock, who are smart enough and competent enough and loyal enough to keep themselves out of trouble? Is that what God is like? Is that what Jesus is like? Hold that thought for a moment.
What is God like? God is like a Poor Woman
The second metaphor is even more surprising. God is a woman who has lost a coin.
I know what you must be thinking: “You mean God isn’t an old white guy with a long white beard up in heaven?” Believe it or not, while Jesus certainly uses the analogy that God is like a Father for very important reasons, there are other passages that say God is like a mother who comforts her children, or God is Lady Wisdom who guides Israel, or God is a mother bird protecting her young. Look them up. They are worth a Google. The Bible speaks about God in a number of ways to communicate God’s love, and here, Jesus uses the analogy that God is like a woman searching for a coin.
Now, who is this woman? We are given some clues: She has ten coins. A silver coin was a day’s wage. Angela suggested last week that ten silver coins could have been her dowry (the money her father set aside to pay for a wedding); sometimes, the ten coins were laced together onto a headdress for unmarried women to wear. Either that or it could be her life savings. Whatever the case, it suggests she is very poor. If it is her dowry, in a culture where women had very little, marriage was the means of provision and stability. This coin was her future. Or, if it was her life savings, as you can imagine, having only ten days’ worth of savings is not much, and losing even a little would cause panic and desperation. This could be money for her next meal.
It also says she lives in a home that apparently does not have windows (she needs to light a lamp in order to see). In other words, her home is not large and not that nice. This is a person that lives on the brink of destitution.
Desperate and destitute—let’s just let this sink in for a second: God is like a poor, desperate peasant woman looking for the money that she desperately needs to sustain her well-being. If you did not know it was Jesus telling this parable, you might feel like this is an irreverent idea. God is like a woman? God is like a poor woman? God needs the lost desperately?
It begs the question: Do we matter to God? Do the lost matter to God? If so, how much? Is God the kind of God that is unaffected by whether we are saved or not? Or is God like a poor woman desperately trying to find her lost coin?
I was raised with a certain belief about God that said God is the kind of God that chooses some to be saved, some to be God’s elect, and the others, God in his sovereignty, chooses to leave them in the judgment of their sin that they rightly deserve. Perhaps you were raised with that belief, or perhaps you are looking at me thinking, “What! There are Christians that believe that?” Yes, a lot of them, actually (particularly in the United States for some reason), and they find lots of interesting verses in the Bible to support this idea. But then again, you can cobble together a verse here or there in the Bible to justify almost anything.
Now, if you were raised with an idea like that, you probably were also taught that this was a very good and biblical idea because no one deserves to be saved (which is true), but God, in his grace, has chosen certain ones to be saved, and thank goodness, you are one of them.
Many Christians get by immensely comforted by this notion, but to me, as a young man, it caused profound distress. How could God love some with a saving love and not others? How could God love anything with a less-than-perfect and powerful love?
This became particularly disturbing when a person started coming to the church I attended with my family. He came to faith from a completely non-religious background. I remember him being so passionate about God, and, of course, the church rejoiced. He was the evidence that we were reaching the lost. In fact, I remember, right around that time, a sermon on this very parable, praising how this church was seeing the lost sheep come home.
However, as I learned, this young man had a lot of difficult stuff in his life, and one Sunday, I noticed he just stopped coming to church. When contacted, the guy just said he wasn’t interested in all this religious stuff anymore. It wasn’t helping him with whatever he was going through (which, to this day, I don’t know what that was).
This created a dilemma for me because I was raised with the notion that God chooses some for salvation, and for those he does choose, we would say the phrase, “once saved, always saved.” And so, I had to ask my pastor: Is this person still saved? And if so, how could he just walk away from his faith like that? My pastor thought about this and said, with a bit of ire in his voice, “Obviously, he just wasn’t saved to begin with then.” He thought this was a satisfactory answer to my question.
I did not think so. You see, if a person that at one point confesses Jesus is passionate for him as this person clearly was, but then gives up their faith—if this person was never saved, to begin with, how can anyone really know whether they are saved? If eternal security works like that, how can anyone feel, well, secure? I didn’t.
I can tell you that many times in my younger years, I worried whether or not I was saved. Because if God is the kind of God that has only chosen some people to be saved and others not, and there is a whole bunch that think they are saved but actually aren’t, I needed to know for certain that I am one of those chosen, and the only way I could know, I reasoned, is that I believe the right things, I do the right things, or I feel close to God, all of which confirm in some way that God chose me.
The problem with that is that if we believe we know God chose us for salvation because we have the right doctrine, anytime we question our beliefs, we end up feeling uncertain about our salvation. Or if we believe we are saved because we have done something right or keep doing what is right, then anytime we fail, we can feel our salvation is in jeopardy. Or if we think we are saved because of how we feel, there will be times of grief, dryness or loneliness that might make us feel God is far away. Now, all of these things have their place in the Christian life—beliefs, actions, and feelings (a deeper relationship with God involves believing what is true, doing what is right, and being sincere, sensing God’s presence)—but anytime they are used as the sole indicator for whether God loves us, they get distorted. They get used to something they were not meant for. I talked a bit last week about how we can do that.
The reality is the only way we know whether we are saved is not in anything we are or do or have. It simply comes down to this question: Who is God when we realize we are lost?
What is God like? That is what these parables tell us.
God is the God who loves the lost.
God is the God who sees the lost as essential to God’s self.
God is desperate for us, frantic for us, persistent for us.
God is the God who seeks out and finds the lost.
God is the kind of God that brings the lost home when we don’t know how to get home.
God is the kind of God whose deepest joy is seeing the lost realize they are found.
Why? Why is God like that? The only answer possible at the end of the day is simply that is who God is.
What does God Do? God Finds the Lost
Now, there is another question here: What does God do?
God is like a shepherd that goes out and finds and brings home lost sheep. God is like a poor woman who lights a lamp and searches till her coin is found. God is the active agent here. This once again confronts a distortion we so often have in our faith about God.
Sometimes, I think we conceive of God as the person on the other end of a help phone line, which is to say, is not super helpful usually.
My wife and I tried to apply for a grant to get our house off of oil and onto heat pumps. There is an initiative by the government to help homes become more energy efficient that we learned about and decided to go for. I don’t know if you noticed, but the price of oil has increased a wee bit lately.
Now, what seems like a simple thing—install heat pumps and get a grant—is not so simple. You have to have an inspection on the heat usage of the home. You have to send in that report. You have to use government-certified products and certain government-certified companies to install the heat pumps. They have to do a report to the government; you have to submit papers; you have to have another heat usage inspection; you need to submit papers from the bank, etc.
At some point, we had to call the government helpline. I am sure you all know how delightful this can be. You call, and you get that automated voice that gives you a list of options, which really none of them fits what you want, so you kind of guess. It keeps giving you prompts to enter information on the number pad, but in the back of your head, you keep saying, “Please, I just want to talk to a human.” Finally, the automated secretary sends you to a representative.
Somehow, if the stars align, if you are able to provide every piece of meticulous paperwork, you are put on hold listening to that terrible elevator music for what seems like an eternity, and then finally, the representative presses the magic button they must have on their desk to do what you were hoping they would do.
Like I said, I think some people think God is like that. If you come to God, and you have your proverbial paperwork together, then God is helpful.
I knew someone very dear to me who loved to recite the folk saying, “God helps those who help themselves.” Have you ever heard that? If that is the case (and there is truth to that saying, don’t get me wrong), what about those who can’t help themselves? What about those who are beyond help?
Notice what these parables don’t say. It doesn’t say the shepherd went out to get his lost sheep, searched for a bit, it got dark, and so the shepherd called it a night and cut his losses. It doesn’t say that.
It doesn’t say the shepherd found the sheep, but the sheep was caught in a thicket so dense the shepherd just couldn’t get the sheep out. It does not say that.
It doesn’t say the woman searched but, in the end, gave up. It doesn’t say that.
It doesn’t say she looked high and low, but realized 9 out of 10 coins is still pretty good. It just does not say that.
It says God goes out actively and persistently, and God finds the lost.
Sadly, I think we often think about God like sin does stop; it stops God from finding he lost. Yet, when we look at Jesus, who bore all sin at the cross and rose from the grave to new life, we see that God has overcome sin, all sin. The very power of death itself does not stop God’s grace.
I once knew a man named Alexander, who started attending the church I pastored. He started attending the church because of the community garden we organized, which was kind of a surprise to me because the community garden was a project we did just as a service to the community. I did not expect folks to start attending the church over it. But he liked what the church was about and started coming.
He shared his story with me. Alexander was an older man, but when he was a boy growing up, he told me that at a Catholic school, a priest tried to sexually assault him. Thankfully, he kicked the man off of him and ran away, but he said from that day on, he hated God, and he hated all things having to do with religion, and his life became a big mess for years.
Years later, he had an accident. He was in a coma, and he said he woke up from that coma, and he described to me that it was like God turned his heart back on. He woke up with a powerful sense that God loved him, and he did not have hate in his heart anymore about the things that had happened to him.
Yes, God can do that. God can turn back years of hurt and hate. God is the God that finds the lost. God can break through the walls of rebellion and resentment. Why? Because that is what God does.
I could tell other stories like that, but these experiences have impressed upon me that I simply do not believe there is anything that can ultimately prevent God’s grace from finding those that are lost. Nothing limits God’s grace.
This is where things get complicated: God wants a daily relationship with us, where we live God’s grace, showing it to others. We know that our choices matter and that God’s love desires us to choose him. Yet, I can only surmise that any choice that rejects God’s love and life, embracing darkness and destruction, is no real choice at all. It is a delusion. It is enslavement.
And when we make bad choices, when we get ourselves lost, is God done with us? Is there ever a point where God says, “Okay, fine, you and I are through”? Is that what God does?
One time, I was asked to go visit an older lady, one of those beloved saints of the church, who lived in a retirement home. Her husband had passed away a few years earlier, but recently, her son passed away, and someone suggested to me that I should go visit. So, I went, and I sat down with her at her apartment.
She shared with me that she spoke with her son just before he died in hospital. She pleaded with him about whether he believed in Jesus anymore, and his answer was, “I just don’t believe in religion anymore.” That was the last response she had on the matter before he died. When she told that to one of her Christian friends, that friend gave a blunt response: “Well, then it is obvious where he is.”
This broke her. She told me that she had prayed for her son every day for decades, trusting that God hears and answers prayer, that God is mighty to save, and that God’s will is to save sinners. How could this happen? How could God not answer her prayers for her son? How could God not change his heart?
At the thought of it, she began to weep and wail with a bitterness I could not even begin to describe to you. I did not know a human being could cry like that. I remember getting in my car after and shaking; it was so disturbing.
In the moment, sitting with her, fighting back tears myself, all I could manage to choke out of me was to say that I didn’t know where her son was, but I do trust that God is merciful.
I have thought about those moments many times since that day. It makes you ask what do I fundamentally trust about God?
I trust in the God who finds and saves the lost; I cannot believe otherwise.
I can’t believe in a God that lets our sin win.
I can’t believe in a God whose grace loses to human ignorance.
I can’t believe in a God that is obstructed by death.
I believe in a God that conquers death.
I believe in a God that loves so much, so ardently, so fiercely that God willing dies the death we deserve in order to give us his life.
I believe in a God that does not give up on us.
God is the kind of God that finds and saves the lost.
While there are dire warnings in Scripture about rejecting God and we can never presume a future that is only up to God, nevertheless, the whole sweep of Scripture impresses on us that God’s mercy simply cannot be limited, and when humanity shows God our very worse, and God even says he is in his right to punish, God surprises us with just how much greater his mercy is.
It does not make sense, but that is who God is, and that is what God does.
I think that is what these parables are trying to tell us. One writer suggests that when we look at the parables, there is always something that does not make sense about them. For instance, why does the shepherd leave the ninety-nine —in the “wilderness,” it says, by the way—to go look for that one sheep? No smart shepherd would risk that. It is like the shepherd loves the lost sheep too much. And don’t you think it is a bit odd for a woman in severe poverty to throw a party just because she found a coin—remember that her ten coins were very likely the dowry that would pay for a wedding celebration, and yet she throws a celebration because she found one of the coins. That does not seem particularly frugal. That does not seem to make a lot of sense, does it? It almost seems gratuitous, even wasteful, so much so that it makes certain religious folk upset.
But it seems that Jesus weaves these details in to try to drive home the truth about God that does not conform to our reasoning. We so often assume that because we are limited beings, God’s grace has limits too.
For us, when we or others get in trouble, we eventually hit that point that says, “We’re done. It’s over.” And yet, God is the shepherd that goes out and finds the lost sheep, leaving the 99. God is that poor woman who so desperately needs her lost coin that she lights a lamp, tracks it down and finds it.
These parables tell us the other-worldly truth that the more lost we are, the more loved we are. The more hopeless we feel, in reality, the more God is pursuing us with a love more powerful than death itself.
This he invites us to trust now, to step into and live now, to be changed and healed by it now and to bring this hope to others right now.
Because it also says that the greatest joy in heaven is seeing the lost get found.
That is who God is and what he does. Let’s pray.
Loving and gracious God, you are the shepherd who seeks, the poor woman who searches; you are the one who finds the lost.
God rebuke in us any pretension that leads us to believe we earned your grace.
You are the God that saves sinners.
So, God, we pray that you would save all sinners just like us.
Reassure us that no one is out of your reach. Comfort us that we are all in your grasp.
God, we long for all people to know you, to know your love.
And so, teach us how to be witnesses of your good news so that we can see the joy of salvation in others and more deeply in ourselves as well.
Strengthen us with your Spirit for this good work.
Amen.
“Longing to be at One”: Sermon for the CTS Prayer Service
Preached at the Chapel of the Holy Spirit at Sacred Heart University for the Prayer Service of the College Theology Society and National Baptist Professors of Religion (Region at Large)
Friday June 2, 2023, in anticipation of Trinity Sunday
Scripture Reading: John 17: 1-26
As I said before, my name is Spencer Boersma. I am a Baptist pastor and theologian, and I teach at Acadia Divinity College in Nova Scotia, Canada. My regular courses are Introductions to Christian Theology, parts 1 and 2, at the grad level there. What that often means is that I get to take some plucky grad students through doctrines of incarnation, atonement, soteriology and such. Some I get the sense they come to class from churches so dogmatic, I think in their minds they do not need this class. Others come from churches that don’t go near theology with a ten-foot pole. Well, needless to say, it makes things interesting.
When we get to the doctrine of the Trinity, there are always mixed feelings. It’s important for most people in their minds, but they don’t get it. It’s fundamental but fuzzy. I tell them about Dorothy Sayers (which they have no idea who that is), and how she once joked that she felt like the Trinity was something theologians thought up one day to make life harder for the rest of us. To this, I like to admit to my students, “Ya’caught me, Dorothy! You do know how I love to make things difficult for my students!” (That is when I say it is just a joke, and the students look at me unconvinced).
As we come upon Trinity Sunday, we have to admit that probably most of us at one point have sympathized with Sayer’s feelings on the matter. Why has the mystery of the Trinity been so onerous? Too often, the Trinity has been captured in impersonal analogies – if any of you have ever wondered why it just wasn’t comforting to know that God is like a clover or like an egg or like an ice cube. And we wonder why it does not connect with people.
Too often, the Trinity is relegated to an appendix of theology: an unnecessary fixture some will just eventually have removed.
Or worse: Too often, the Trinity is the club to bludgeon the dissenter rather than nurse the sick soul.
Dorothy Sayers followed up her joke about the Trinity with a really good piece of advice about understanding the doctrine: if you want to understand the doctrine, you need to look at the drama. If you want to understand the our Triune God, look at the narrative of the Bible.
To confess Christ is to attest to how we have found ourselves in a story where the Creator, who reveals Godself as One, the I am who I am – this God, who appears to the men and women, who rescues and redeems Israel out of bondage, who makes covenants and sends prophets – this God longs to be with humanity fully and unreservedly. This God longs to be at one with us.
This God, who is beyond all things, is also the root of all existence, in whom we live and move and have our being. This God is transcendent and infinite, but this God is also Spirit, the breath of life, closer to us than we are to ourselves.
It is this God who has chosen to come in the form of Jesus Christ, God Immanuel, the messiah who perfectly enfleshes the presence of the God Israel worshiped but also fulfills the longing for righteousness Israel was called to. Jesus shows us that God has come to be at one with us.
Yet, we are not at one. Oh no, we are not at one.
As I said, we travelled down from Nova Scotia. It was a beautiful but long drive. It was made a bit longer to get stopped and searched at the border (that is a story for another time). Anyways.
I live about an hour outside of the province’s major city, Halifax, and if you did not know, we left in the knowledge that parts of Halifax, a city of about a million people, are being evacuated due to a forest fire that is right now about 20 000 hectares (that is over 75 square miles). Hundreds of homes have been destroyed by a fire caused by such dryness that is unheard of for a province that literally has ocean on all sides of it.
Of course, the news is quick to point out the obvious answers as to why: They say the fire was probably caused by someone walking along in the forest having a cigarette and turning and flicking their butt into the dry grass. The weather is getting more and more severe because we are dealing with the effects of climate change. While Nova Scotia has moved to have among the best recycling practices on the continent, there is still so much to be done in our energy sector, which is still very reliant on oil, and our climate is affected by practices all over the world. And at the end of the day, all it took was one person to flick a cigarette, and now, 200 families might not have homes to come back to.
It is things like a forest fire that remind us that a city of a million people still is a community, depending on one another, needing one another; affected by the choices of one another; that our states and providences and nations, just like individuals are not self-enclosed, independent, self-reliant units, able to carry one without help or to help others. We are dependent on the earth and the seas, the fish and the animals, for the very processes of life that sustain us. We are learning the hard way that we are all connected. Where one acts irresponsibly, all are affected, but also, where one suffers, all suffer.
And yet, history is a sad record of humanity, Christians included, choosing to ignore this fact. Our lives are marred with reminders that we are living alienated from nature and each other. We are divided against the very things we need most. We are killing ourselves because we are constantly failing to see ourselves, our fate, and our identity, as dependent on others. We know we need to be one; we long to be at one with each other; we long for unity and harmony where we can all be ourselves, and others can be themselves in peace with the earth, and yet, we are not at one. We have given in to greed and selfishness or just slipped into an easy thoughtlessness, too concerned with the rat race of life.
We find ourselves reliving this story of humanity again and again, which comes to a particular apex and intensity when people rejected Jesus’ invitation to step into the oneness of God, the kingdom of heaven. Jesus died on the cross, executed by an instrument of imperial oppression orchestrated by the corrupt religious institution, but also betrayed by the ones Jesus was closest with. The cross discloses the tragic depth of our proclivity to refuse to be at one with God and others.
It is here we must remember that Jesus bore the consequences of human division. As the people cried out, “Crucify him!” he prayed for their forgiveness.
And yet, for Jesus, God in human flesh, for him to die as one counted as a sinner, yet one with the Father, God has revealed through Jesus Christ God’s loving solidarity with every human being, no matter how lost or sinful. God chooses to see Godself in us and with us.
So often, we are tempted to lose heart, to recoil and collapse under the weight of our guilt and shame, when we think about the state of our world, our complicity in things like racism, colonialism, climate change, or just our individual apathy to the needs of others we encounter on a daily basis – there is so much that might cause us to shrink back and say we don’t deserve a better world. We deserve what is coming to us.
It is in these moments of condemnation that we are encountered by a presence, a love that invites us to see that we are loved with the same perfect love the Father has for his own only begotten Son.
Our Gospel is that in the cross and resurrection, God has shown us who God is.
God is the God that stands with the least of us, the god-forsaken, the oppressed, the outcasts, the sinners: all of us.
God is the God who, in our darkest moments, the comforting Spirit comes, one with us, bringing the presence of undeserved hope.
This God who is God above has come and walked with us in Christ as God beside us and has redeemed us with the Spirit, leading us forward as God within us and through us.
And so, the Apostle John challenges us to be at one with each other in a similar way to how the Father is at one with the Son and how God is at one with us: May they be one as we are one. He prays for his disciples, and he is praying for us today: God knows I could use some prayer on this.
I had my family call me from Ontario, wondering if I was safe and okay with the fires they had heard about in Nova Scotia. I caught myself saying, “I am okay. This does not affect me.”
I caught myself doing something we all too easily do: since hardship or oppression does not touch my immediate experience, my job and family, I conclude I am not affected.
One reason the Trinity feels abstract is that we so often use it as just one more way to honour God with our lips (and perhaps our cognitive minds), but the reality is our hearts are far from God.
Again, folks are so often tempted to see the Trinity as some abstract idea (and we theologians can admit some part in that), but the Trinity flows from our relationship with God. It is an invitation into the movements of worship and prayer, service and sacrifice that speaks to the essence of who we are and the only way we can move forward: We are connected; we belong to one another. And in God’s choice to be bound to us, to refuse to let us go, we are awakened to our responsibility to others – more than this, our sacred privilege, our witness – beginning with our fellow Christians, whether we are Catholic or Baptist, American or Canadian, whatever our race, sex, or status – it begins with us who have awoken to the reality that we are all children of God.
As we leave this place, will we persist in seeing ourselves as removed and unaccountable and unaffected? Or will we choose to see ourselves in others? Will we weep with those who weep, seeing others suffering as our suffering? Will we see choose to see the success of others as the measure of our success?
May we, daily in choices, grand or small, step into the oneness of God, who will one day be all in all. Amen.
Spencer Boersma 